The VMware vSphere host hides the physical storage layer from end users, and instead, provides a logical storage layer to interact. Virtual machines use virtual disks, which reside on a VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore. Virtual disks are also stored in raw disk datastores or NFS-based datastores. Virtual machines use virtual SCSI controllers, including VMware Paravirtual, BusLogic Parallel, LSI Logic Parallel, and LSI Logic SAS to access the virtual disks in datastores. We will discuss the following topics in this chapter:
Storage log files
Multipathing and Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) troubleshooting
Storage module troubleshooting
Troubleshooting iSCSI datastores
iSCSI error correction
Troubleshooting NFS datastores
Troubleshooting VMFS datastores
SAN display problems
SAN performance troubleshooting
Snapshot and resignaturing