Chapter 5. Managing Storage

In the previous chapter, we started by mentioning that network and storage are the two components that can heavily influence the host and the VM performance. Both, network and storage, must be carefully planned. Otherwise, as mentioned in the previous chapter, changing the hardware configuration on the fly can be painful. From the storage perspective, today we have some techniques that minimize the impact of changing the underlying hardware for the VM.

In fact, throughout this chapter, you will be able to understand that there are multiple options for configuring both the host and the VM storage. You have the disk options that can be a spinning disk or a solid state drive. Then you choose how to connect your host to your Storage Fabric, which can be a Storage Area Network (SAN) or a Network Attached Storage (NAS); you can even choose to use a local storage or a Direct Attached Storage (DAS). The VM storage is another multiple option plan: Physical or...