A modern day virtual data center will need some sort of shared storage to hold all the virtual machine data or other files necessary to run the services that will be hosted on the infrastructure. It could be a direct attached or remote shared storage. Access to shared storage is required to enable most of the cluster features such as vSphere HA, DRS, and vSphere FT. In this chapter, you will learn how to plan, implement, and manage storage access to a vSphere infrastructure.
We shall cover the following topics in this chapter:
Local versus remote storage
Storage Protocols
Pluggable storage architecture
Storage Array types
Configuring access to Fiber channel storage
Configuring access to iSCSI Storage
Configuring access to NFS storage
Datastore management
Storage I/O control
Storage DRS