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

Thin Provisioning


VMware vSphere allows us to maximize utilization of our storage by using a deployment method called Thin Provisioning. Thin-provisioned storage is presented in full to the guest VM, but the host and storage are only utilizing the actual data capacity that is in use. In turn, this allows us to provision more capacity to VMs than what we physically have available. Thin Provisioning can be applied either on the array level, the virtual disk level, or a mixture of both. In this chapter, we will focus mostly on virtual disk or hypervisor thin provisioning; however, both are explained in the following sections.

Array thin provisioning

Most storage arrays support array level thin provisioning on a LUN-by-LUN basis. When a thin-provisioned LUN is presented to a host, any thin or lazy zeroed virtual disks on that LUN will consume only the storage that they need, freeing up the space they would normally consume to be provisioned to other LUNs on the array. All the dynamic growing processes...