Book Image

Mastering VMware vSphere Storage

By : Victor Wu, Eagle Huang
Book Image

Mastering VMware vSphere Storage

By: Victor Wu, Eagle Huang

Overview of this book

<p>vSphere Storage is one of the three main infrastructure components of a vSphere deployment (Compute, Storage, and Network).</p> <p>Mastering VMware vSphere Storage begins with an insightful introduction to virtualization and creating your own virtual machines. We then talk about VMware vCenter Server and virtual machine management, as well as managing vSphere 5 using vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) and esxcli and vmware-cmd commands. We then swiftly move on to a very interesting topic, reviewing the vSphere performance and troubleshooting methodology. We then configure VM storage profiles, Storage DRS, and Storage I/O control. More significantly, we will troubleshoot and analyze storage using the VMware CLI and learn how to configure iSCSI storage.</p> <p>By the end of the book, you will be able to identify useful information to make virtual machine and virtual data center design decisions.</p>
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering VMware vSphere Storage
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the VMM


The VMM is a key component of the VMware vSphere environment. It is a thin layer that provides virtual x86 hardware for a virtual machine's guest operating system. This hardware includes CPU, memory, network, storage, and so on. Each VMM is serviced to one virtual machine; it shares the CPU, memory, NIC driver, and I/O driver with the VM. The VMM can be configured using hardware virtualization, software virtualization, and paravirtualization techniques. Hardware virtualization and software virtualization will be discussed in the next section. Paravirtualization allows software running on a virtual machine to bypass the virtual interface. It runs the operation on the physical hardware.

The VMM can choose from three monitor modes:

  • Binary translation and shadow page tables

  • Intel VT-x or AMD-V and shadow page tables

  • AMD-V with RVI or Intel VT-x with EPT

Note

Paravirtualization techniques are not commonly implemented in the production environment because they require modifications...