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

The vSphere troubleshooting methodology


In February 2011, VMware released a technical whitepaper titled Performance Troubleshooting for vSphere 4.1 available at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10179. This document provides a large quantity of information as it pertains to troubleshooting not just storage but also CPU, memory, and network from within a vSphere environment and I highly recommend you read it for yourself. Although the current version of vSphere has changed since its publication, the methodologies, workflows, and recommendations in the document still stand today.

That being said, I will highlight some of the key points of the document as well as explain the importance of applying a troubleshooting methodology within our own environments.

When developing any type of process or workflow, it is very important to start with a broad and holistic view of the overall goal, and the same holds true with a troubleshooting methodology. Although you may find as you move through...