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

Troubleshooting Fibre Channel storage visibility


Fibre Channel has been around since 1994 and is probably one of the most widely used and most reliable storage transports available today. Fibre Channel is deployed in a shared storage scenario utilizing Fibre Channel switches to interconnect the storage array and our vSphere hosts. This allows for multiple physical paths between our storage systems and VM hosts.

Tip

Fibre Channel connectivity issues are often a result of latency which will be discussed in Chapter 4, Troubleshooting Storage Contention; however, visibility and connection issues may stem from within our storage switch fabric as well.

Fibre Channel zoning is the process of partitioning a Fibre Channel fabric into smaller chunks to restrict connectivity, visibility, and add a level of security to your Fibre Channel network. Zoning in the Fibre Channel fabric is similar to a firewall except allowing selective presentation between hosts and the storage array. We would not want to allow...