Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

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.
What you will learn from this book
Identify the root cause of storage issues within vSphere
Understand where to look when storage is suddenly not available
Use esxtop to monitor and discover pain points in your infrastructure
Diagnose and resolve SCSI reservations and queuing issues
Design storage properly based on workloads
Monitor and alert on your thinly provisioned disks and data store capacity
Utilize Storage DRS to proactively balance your capacity and workload on your data stores
Maintain compliance in terms of placement with Profile Driven Storage
Grant VMs the performance they need with Storage I/O Control
Decipher storage-related error entries in the vSphere logfiles