Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (20 chapters)
VMware vSphere Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding virtual storage, datastores, and file systems


In any data center, physical or virtual, storage is considered to be the most critical and crucial aspect, because the main purpose of any server or information system is to manage and effectively store data for future retrieval. VMware vSphere offers flexible storage systems to fit in requirements for almost every kind of virtual infrastructure setup.

Having multiple options to choose from gives the storage administrator freedom to setup storage systems as per their personalized needs based on costs, performance, and requirements. Shared storage for multiple reasons is considered to be better than traditional storage solutions as it is enabled using advanced features, such as disaster recovery, high availability, virtual machine migration, and so on.

Ideally, VMware ESXi hosts are configured in such a manner that they all have access to datastores. A datastore is a logical storage container that conceals the individual specifications...