Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

Become a master at troubleshooting and solving common storage issues in your vSphere environment

Overview

• Identify key issues that affect vSphere storage visibility, performance, and capacity
• Comprehend the storage metrics and statistics that are collected in vSphere
• Get acquainted with the many vSphere features that can proactively protect your environment

In Detail

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

Approach

This is a step-by-step example-oriented tutorial aimed at showing the reader how to troubleshoot a variety of vSphere storage problems, and providing the reader with solutions that can be completed with minimal effort and time in order to limit damage to work.

Who this book is written for

If you are a vSphere administrator, this is the book for you. This book will provide you with ‘need to know’ information about the various storage transports that ESXi utilizes, the tools and techniques we can use to identify problems, and the fundamental knowledge and steps to take to troubleshoot storage-related issues. Prior knowledge of the VMWare environment is assumed.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Understanding vSphere Storage Concepts and Methodologies
Chapter 2: Commonly Used Tools for Troubleshooting Storage
Chapter 3: Troubleshooting Storage Visibility
Chapter 4: Troubleshooting Storage Contention
Chapter 5: Troubleshooting Storage Capacity and Overcommitment

Appendix A: Troubleshooting Steps
Appendix B: Statistics of esxtop
Appendix C: iSCSI Error Codes