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

vCenter Storage Views (Reports and Maps)


One of the most commonly used tools used to troubleshoot storage is the Storage Views tab inside the vSphere Client. These storage views provide us with an easy and efficient way to determine what is consuming all of our storage as well as giving us a visually appealing graphical representation of how all of our inventory objects are connected as it pertains to storage.

Tip

Storage views should be available by default within the vSphere Client; however, I have seen times when the tab is not displayed. The storage views functionality is provided by a plugin within vSphere so if you don't see it be sure to have a look in your plugin manager for the vCenter Storage Monitoring plugin and make sure that it is enabled.

The Storage Views tab is available on three of the four vCenter Server Inventory layouts; Hosts & Clusters, VMs and Templates, and Datastores. Depending on which inventory object is selected, the data being displayed will change. However...