Book Image

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

By : Mike Preston
Book Image

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

By: Mike Preston

Overview of this book

Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‘jack of all trades' in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur.This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment.This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today's data centers. You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can't see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Troubleshooting vSphere Storage
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Troubleshooting IP storage visibility


Although most of the troubleshooting techniques between Fibre Channel and IP storage overlap (mostly between FC and iSCSI since they both use block transport and VMFS partition), there are quite a few differences between the two storage types. Since we are now using network adapters inside our hosts and network switches (as opposed to HBAs and FC switches), most of the same concepts around network security such as firewalls, routes, and so on will also be applied to our iSCSI and NFS storage.

Verifying network connectivity to our iSCSI and NFS array

The first step we should always take when experiencing connectivity issues to our network storage is to verify connectivity between our two endpoints; the host and the storage. This may include properly assigning network information to our hardware iSCSI initiators or properly creating a VMkernel port group for the software iSCSI initiator or NFS client. No matter what the issue is, we need to ensure that the...