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 2. Commonly Used Tools for Troubleshooting Storage

Now that we have established a little bit of background knowledge on some of the storage concepts and how to identify different components as it pertains to storage within vSphere, it's time to look at a few tools we can use to aid us in troubleshooting storage issues.

This chapter will give you basic knowledge of a troubleshooting methodology provided by VMware and then show us how we can use some of the built-in tools and logs from within vSphere, ESXi, and other applications to discover and solve storage issues. This fundamental knowledge of how to use these tools is key to understanding and interpreting some of the examples throughout the book.

This chapter will cover the following:

  • The vSphere troubleshooting methodology

  • Using vCenter Storage Maps and Storage Reports

  • Using esxtop/resxtop

  • Common logfiles used in storage troubleshooting