In a virtual datacenter, storage is a serious subject that is often disregarded. In a faultless business world, a virtualization project should be given unlimited cost and a clean slate to achieve what the business wants from storage. However, if we do not have a clean slate or an unlimited budget and, often, if you have been asked to use an already existing SAN, most virtual datacenters will have a SAN infrastructure implemented around a favored storage vendor's product family.

In this section, let's talk about the different types of storage available to VMware vSphere virtualization. Let's begin with FC. FC is a gold standard for both performance and connectivity, with speeds from 1 Gbps to 2 Gbps, 4 Gbps, 8 Gbps, and 16 Gbps. Initially, it was designed, as the name suggests, to use fiber optic cabling. In the past years, the standard has permitted the use of copper cabling. FC was designed to provide access to disks or storage. FC is typically implemented through...