Let's start the chapter by understanding the implications of the host storage, as this will probably be your starting point when planning your virtualization host storage. Before we go into details of each component, it is important to deconstruct a storage device, in this case, imagining that you're using an external storage device and not the local disks.

A Storage Device is basically a set of Connectivity Adapters, Controllers, and physical disks. The Connectivity Adapters are the communication channel between your host and the Storage Device. They can be an iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Network File System (NFS), or even a Server Message Block (SMB). Each one comes its own implementation, protocol and sometimes even different hardware, despite the fact that most of them run on Ethernet.

Another component is the Controller, which is responsible for the intelligence of the underlying disks. It is usually an x86 CPU with RAM memory, like a regular...