Shared storage is very common in any small to enterprise deployment of ESXi and vCenter that requires high availability. The key here is the use of vCenter and functionality including High Availability (HA), vMotion, Storage vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT), and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). For implementations that do not take advantage of high availability, shared storage offers minimal benefits.

vSphere offers several mechanisms. From a pure VMware perspective, there are several opportunities to secure IP-based communication between the hosts and the storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) in the form of authentication. Beyond specific settings within vCenter, there are best practices to be followed in network configurations to isolate and segment storage traffic.

It should be noted that assumptions are made in this section with regard to storage networking. Although network architecture guidance is beyond the scope of this cookbook, providing a...