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

Balancing capacity with Storage DRS


We have discussed Storage DRS previously in Chapter 4, Troubleshooting Storage Contention, in terms of how it helps us balance I/O and performance, but it also helps us to balance our datastore capacity. In fact, Storage DRS can help us to prevent most if not all of the issues discussed in this chapter.

It does this by dynamically monitoring capacity and free space on all of the datastores contained within a datastore cluster. When the utilization hits a certain threshold (80 percent by default), SDRS will compute which VMs could be a candidate to move, and then leverage Storage vMotion to move the VMs and balance out the free space across all datastores within the cluster.

You can use the instructions in Chapter 4, Troubleshooting Storage Contention, to enable SDRS. One caveat is that SDRS is currently only available in Enterprise Plus licensing editions of vSphere. So if you have Enterprise Plus, I would definitely recommend enabling SDRS in your environment...