Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0

Book excerpt: THE ONLY AUTHORITATIVE, COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO VSPHERE STORAGE IMPLEMENTATION AND MANAGEMENT Effective VMware virtualization storage planning and management has become crucial–but it can be extremely complex. Now, the leading VMware expert on storage completely demystifies the "black box" of vSphere storage and provides illustrated, step-by-step procedures for performing every key task associated with it. You’ll gain the deep understanding you need to make better storage decisions, solve problems, and keep problems from occurring in the first place. Mostafa Khalil presents techniques based on years of personal experience helping customers troubleshoot storage in their vSphere production environments. With more experience than anyone else in the field, he combines expert guidelines, insights for better architectural design, best practices for both planning and management, common configuration details, and deep dives into both vSphere and third-party storage. Storage Implementation in vSphere® 5.0 fully explains each storage connectivity choice and protocol supported by VMware, introduces Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA), and shows how to build on PSA with multipathing, failover, and ALUA. It thoroughly introduces Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) and VMDirectPath I/O, and shows how to drive powerful improvements in performance, flexibility, and manageability with VMFS 5 and VAAI. COVERAGE INCLUDES Understanding how FC, FCoE, and iSCSI interact with VMware vSphere 5 Implementing specific VMware capabilities on storage hardware from each leading vendor Avoiding, recognizing, and fixing misconfigurations and other problems Using third-party MPIO plug-ins certified with vSphere 5 and PSA Maximizing availability through multipathing and failover Implementing fixed and round-robin multipathing on arrays with ALUA support Monitoring and optimizing virtual storage performance Managing vSphere-compatible file systems: VMFS and NFS Taking full advantage of VMDirectPath I/O Implementing heterogeneous storage configurations Presenting abstracted storage through virtual disks and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) Using VMFS 5 to simplify management and improve scalability in large-scale environments Sharing storage and migrating more easily across multiple VMware vSphere instances Optimizing storage performance with VAAI-compliant devices Mostafa Khalil, Senior Staff Engineer with VMware Global Support Services, specializes in storage integration for virtual environments. He has worked for VMware for 13 years and supported all VMware virtualization products since Workstation for Linux 1.0 beta. Khalil has worked on most enterprise storage vendors’ solutions and received engineering-level training for many of them. He has presented at every VMworld, and at VMware Partner Exchange, VMware User Group, and USENIX. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-79993-7 ISBN-10: 0-321-79993-3