Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0®, Rough Cuts

Description

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

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 engine

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Part I: Storage Protocols and Block Devices

Chapter 1 Storage Types 1

History of Storage 1

    Birth of the Hard Disks 4

    Along Comes SCSI 4

    PATA and SATA—SCSI’s Distant Cousins? 5

    Units of Measuring Storage Capacity 7

    Permanent Storage Media Relevant to vSphere 5 8

SCSI Standards and Protocols 11

    SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 Standards 11

    Fibre Channel Protocol 12

    Decoding EMC Symmetrix WWPN 25

    Locating Targets’ WWNN and WWPN Seen by vSphere 5 Hosts 27

    SAN Topology 30

    Fabric Switches 35

    FC Zoning 37

    Designing Storage with No Single Points of Failure 41

FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) 49

FCoE Initialization Protocol 51

FCoE Initiators 54

    Hardware FCoE Adapter 54

    Software FCoE Adapter 55

Overcoming Ethernet Limitations 56

    Flow Control in FCoE 57

Protocols Required for FCoE 58

    Priority-Based Flow Control 58

    Enhanced Transmission Selection 58

    Data Center Bridging Exchange 59

    10GigE — A Large Pipeline 59

802.1p Tag 60

Hardware FCoE Adapters 62

How SW FCoE Is Implemented in ESXi 5 62

Configuring FCoE Network Connections 64

Enabling Software FCoE Adapter 68

Removing or Disabling a

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