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

Increasing the size of our datastores


Sometimes, no matter how many unwanted files or snapshots we remove, or how many swap files we manipulate, we simply cannot free up enough space on our datastores. At this point, the only option we have is to extend the VMFS datastore. vSphere has a couple of ways that can increase the size of our datastores. These include growing the existing datastore onto adjacent space or extending the datastore into additional LUNs. Although both techniques result in higher capacity, the processes and benefits differ and are explained in the next section.

Growing a VMFS datastore

As of vSphere 4.0, we have the ability to grow our VMFS volumes into adjacent free space in order to increase their capacity. In order to grow our volumes, we must first ensure that there is free space available on the LUN hosting the datastore. Typically, a vSphere administrator would format all available space on the LUN as a VMFS partition when it is presented to the ESXi host. This means...