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

vSphere storage APIs for array integration and storage awareness


In Chapter 3, Using the Virtual Machine Monitor, you gained knowledge about performance monitoring in a VMware vSphere environment. VMware vMotion is a key feature in vSphere hosts. An ESXi host cannot provide the vMotion feature if it is without shared SAN storage. SAN storage is a key component in a VMware vSphere environment. In large-scale virtualization environments, there are many virtual machines stored in SAN storage. When a VMware administrator executes virtual machine cloning or migrates a virtual machine to another ESXi host by vMotion, this operation allocates the resource on that ESXi host and SAN storage.

In vSphere 4.1 and later versions, it can support VAAI. The vSphere storage API is used by a storage vendor who provides hardware acceleration or offloads vSphere I/O between storage devices. These APIs can reduce the resource overhead on ESXi hosts and improve performance for ESXi host operations, for example...