A modern day virtual data center will need some sort of shared storage to hold all the virtual machine data or other files necessary to run the services that will be hosted on the infrastructure. It could be a direct attached or remote shared storage. Access to shared storage is required to enable most of the cluster features such as vSphere HA, DRS, and vSphere FT. In this chapter, you will learn how to plan, implement, and manage storage access to a vSphere infrastructure.
We shall cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Local versus remote storage
- Storage Protocols
- Pluggable storage architecture
- Storage Array types
- Configuring access to Fiber channel storage
- Configuring access to iSCSI Storage
- Configuring access to NFS storage
- Datastore management
- Storage I/O control
- Storage DRS
ESXi supports the use of both local and remote storage. Local storage is a category that includes storage devices directly installed inside the server or any type of directly attached storage solution. Remote storage is a category that includes storage devices accessed over either the Ethernet or Fiber channel network:
When you design an environment with no remote storage, special care should be taken to use supported hard disk types. VMware ESXi supports the following disk types:
- SATA
- SCSI
- IDE
- USB
- SAS
The type of hard disks used at the remote storage could be of any type supported by the storage array. This is because the remote storage is accessed over an already supported interface such as a network adapter (NIC) or a storage initiator (FC HBA).