Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Creating and Confi guring Storage
Devices
Storage has always been a critical element for any environment, and the storage infrastructure
supporting vSphere is no different. This chapter will help you with all the elements required for
a proper storage subsystem design, starting with vSphere storage fundamentals at the datastore
and VM level and extending to best practices for coni guring the storage array. Good storage
design is critical for anyone building a virtual datacenter.
In this chapter, you will learn to
Differentiate and understand the fundamentals of shared storage, including SANs
and NAS
◆
◆
Understand vSphere storage options
Coni gure storage at the vSphere layer
◆
Coni gure storage at the VM layer
◆
Leverage best practices for SAN and NAS storage with vSphere
◆
Reviewing the Importance of Storage Design
Storage design has always been important, but it becomes more so as vSphere is used for larger
workloads, for mission-critical applications, for larger clusters, and as the basis for offerings
based on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a nearly 100 percent virtualized datacenter. You
can probably imagine why this is the case:
Advanced Capabilities
Many of vSphere's advanced features depend on shared storage;
vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere
Fault Tolerance (FT), and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager all have a critical depen-
dency on shared storage.
Performance
People understand the benei ts that virtualization brings—consolidation,
higher utilization, more l exibility, and higher efi ciency. But often, people have initial ques-
tions about how vSphere can deliver performance for individual applications when it is
inherently consolidated and oversubscribed. Likewise, the overall performance of the VMs
and the entire vSphere cluster both depend on shared storage, which is also highly consoli-
dated and oversubscribed.
