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

Datastore file management


Datastore file management is the simplest way to free up some space on our datastores. vSphere environments tend to be very dynamic in nature, with VMs being deployed and destroyed on multiple occasions. Often a VM will get created to perform a certain task or test and then abandoned. The VM will often be powered down and removed from inventory, leaving the files that make up that VM on the datastore.

Even though we have retired the application, powered down the VM, and removed it from inventory, the files that make up that VM still reside on the datastore and still consume space. And we aren't limited to just unregistered VMs in this case. A VMFS datastore can hold any type of file placed in it. Therefore, if we have placed ISO image files or other packages in our datastores, they will also contribute to the overall capacity usage.

So how do we find out what and where these files are? Unfortunately, there is no button that we can simply press to do this for us. There...