This book is for users who already have some experience with the VMware vSphere platform. You will want to learn and design VMware vSphere storage solutions and how to troubleshoot vSphere storage issues. Also, you will want to know how to design ESXi hosts, virtual machines, and virtual data centers in a better way.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with vSphere 5.x and vCenter 5.x, shows you the difference between physical and virtual hosts and the benefits of using a virtualized host, and describes how to set up VMware ESXi Server and VMware vCenter Server.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with vSphere Management Assistant, explains what VMware vSphere Management Assistant is, how to set up and configure it with vSphere Server, and how to enable ESXi TSM during troubleshooting.
Chapter 3, Using the Virtual Machine Monitor, introduces the components of the VMware vSphere ESXi architecture and the VMM. You will also learn the techniques to configure software and hardware with VMM in the virtual machine.
Chapter 4, Storage Scalability, explains the vSphere Storage API for Array Integration (VAAI) and Storage Awareness (VASA). In this chapter, you also learn about the vSphere administrator and how to configure the virtual machine storage profile and assign it to the ESXi data store.
Chapter 5, Optimizing Storage, teaches you the concept of storage virtualization and how to monitor the storage metric using vSphere performance charts and esxtop/resxtop. You will also learn about the management of vSphere storage using the command line.
Chapter 6, vSphere Storage Configuration Settings, discusses what a storage component is, for example, the LUN name, identifier name, and runtime name. You also learn how to set up LUN masking on a vSphere host using esxcli commands, and setting up vSphere Syslog Collector to collect the ESXi host's log.
Chapter 7, Analyzing vSphere Storage by CLI, provides more commands for managing vSphere storage. Here, you also read about the difference between the existing VMFS signature and resignaturing.
Chapter 8, Troubleshooting vSphere FC Storage, focuses on troubleshooting vSphere FC storage, and explains the FC storage infrastructure. This chapter lists some examples that show you how to troubleshoot.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting vSphere iSCSI Storage, is concerned with analyzing the vSphere iSCSI storage infrastructure, and lists some examples that show how to troubleshoot.
Chapter 10, Troubleshooting vSphere NFS Storage, describes some examples that tell you how to carry out NFS troubleshooting.
Chapter 11, vSphere Storage Design, tells the story of the vSphere storage architecture design and its main point. This chapter also illustrates the design method.
Chapter 12, ESXi Host Design, contains the story of the key points of the ESXi host design, according to the actual environment, for example, how to design the host.
Chapter 13, Virtual Machine Design, analyzes the main points of the virtual machine design in detail. At the same time, according to the actual environment, we see, for example, how to design the virtual machine.
Chapter 14, vSphere Virtual Datacenter Design, describes in detail the main points of the virtual data center design, and as an example, we see how to design a virtual data center.
This book requires the following software: VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCenter Server 5, VMware vSphere Management Assistant 5 (vMA), and vCenter Operation Manager.
This book is for users such as data center administrators, people at IT help desks, and IT architects who have already worked with the VMware vSphere platform and who want to design a VMware vSphere Storage solution and troubleshoot issues.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Open a web browser and enter this URL: https://<vcenter FQDN or vcenter IP address>: 9443/vsphere-client/ (port 9443 is the default)."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
esxtop –a –b > "output-name.csv"
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To use the bundled database, click on Install a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express instance."
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