VMware ESXi enables multiple hosts to share the same physical storage through its optimized storage stack and VMware VMFS-distributed filesystem. Centralized storage of VMs can be accomplished using VMFS and/or NFS. Centralized storage enables virtualization capabilities, such as VMware vMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and VMware High Availability.
Several factors have an effect on storage performance:
- Storage protocols
- Proper configuration of your host device and storage devices
- Load balancing across available storage processors
- Storage queues
To step through this recipe, you will need one or more running ESXi Servers, an HBA card, an NIC card, and a Fibre Channel (FC) or an iSCSI storage. No other prerequisites are required.