Book Image

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

By : Mike Preston
Book Image

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

By: Mike Preston

Overview of this book

Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‘jack of all trades' in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur.This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment.This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today's data centers. You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can't see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Troubleshooting vSphere Storage
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Logfiles used in vSphere Storage troubleshooting


Logfiles have long been the norm for providing us with a wealth of information as to what is occurring inside any system. The same holds true with vSphere and ESXi. In fact, vSphere has quite a few logfiles that it uses to report on almost every single event that occurs within our environment. This is the main reason why the first thing that is asked to any customer during a support call is to send the logfile bundle for further analysis. Whether it is the ESXi host, vCenter Server, or the virtual machine itself, each has its own set of logfiles stored in different locations.

ESXi logging

ESXi has a very robust logging system with a number of different logfiles. Each one provides a unique and organized way of logging different events that occur. For instance, shell authentication events go to the auth log, patch and update events will go to the esxupdate log, and so on. The following table shows a full list of all the logs contained in an ESXi...