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

Chapter 1. Understanding vSphere Storage Concepts and Methodologies

Before jumping into the details of how to troubleshoot vSphere Storage, it's best to understand the basics of how storage operates in a virtualized environment. On the whole, ESXi is a very user-friendly, easy-to-use hypervisor. However, when we look at it in terms of troubleshooting and storage, there are a lot ofcomplex scenarios and key pieces of information that we need to know in order to resolve issues as they occur.

This chapter will help us to better understand the fundamentals of how vSphere and ESXi attach to and utilize various types of storage and show us how we can identify our datastores, storage paths, and LUNs within our environment. We will also learn about the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and take a broader look at how an application running in a virtual machine accesses storage.

The topics that we'll be covering in this chapter are:

  • Storage virtualization

  • Supported filesystems

  • Storage naming

  • The vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture

  • An I/O request—from start to finish