Book Image

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran
Book Image

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

Overview of this book

VMware vSphere is a complete and robust virtualization product suite that helps transform data centers into simplified on-premises cloud infrastructures, providing for the automation and orchestration of workload deployment and life cycle management of the infrastructure. This book focuses on the latest release of VMware vSphere and follows a recipe-based approach, giving you hands-on instructions required to deploy and manage a vSphere environment. The book starts with the procedures involved in upgrading your existing vSphere infrastructure to vSphere 6.5, followed by deploying a new vSphere 6.5 environment. Then the book delves further into the procedures involved in managing storage and network access to the ESXi hosts and the virtual machines running on them. Moving on, the book covers high availability and fair distribution/utilization of clustered compute and storage resources. Finally, the book covers patching and upgrading the vSphere infrastructure using VUM, certificate management using VMCA, and finishes with a chapter covering the tools that can be used to monitor the performance of a vSphere infrastructure.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Introduction

Both iSCSI and NFS are storage solutions that can leverage the existing TCP/IP network infrastructure. Hence, they are referred to as IP-based storage. Before we start learning how to configure them, let's delve into some iSCSI and NFS fundamentals.

iSCSI fundamentals

The Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) is a protocol used to transport SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. In an iSCSI environment, the client machine (in this case, an ESXi host) uses iSCSI initiators (hardware/software) to connect to iSCSI targets on an iSCSI storage system.

Let's review some of the iSCSI terminology that you will need to be aware of before you learn how to configure and manage access to iSCSI storage...