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 3. Troubleshooting Storage Visibility

Now that we have a solid understanding of how vSphere handles storage as well as a lot of the common tools we can use to troubleshoot and view storage, it's time to dive deep into the primary topic of this book which is troubleshooting vSphere Storage. In this chapter, we will walk through some of the common troubleshooting steps to take when LUNs are not visible to our ESXi hosts. We will also cover how to troubleshoot individual Fibre Channel paths to storage, storage claim rules, and LUN masking, as well as the process of resignaturing a LUN.

From there, we will move into IP storage and discuss the various troubleshooting steps to undertake when dealing with both iSCSI and NFS visibility issues.

This chapter covers the following:

  • Common storage visibility issues across block transport types

    • ESXi claim rules and Logical Unit Number (LUN) masking

    • Troubleshooting paths and path selection

    • vCenter Server Storage filters

    • Disk resignaturing

    • LUN numbering...