VMware vSphere: Skills for Storage Administrators

Course details

This course enables storage administrators to better plan and manage their storage systems to support a VMware vSphere™ environment. Through lecture, hands-on labs, and case studies, you will learn about vSphere interaction and operation with storage rather than learning vSphere administration skills.

Target Audience

• Storage administrators who support vSphere environments

Objectives

• Storage functionality in vSphere
• Basic concepts related to virtual computing, including vSphere server and storage virtualization
• Partner with vSphere administrators to design, configure, manage, and troubleshoot storage in a vSphere environment
• Trade-offs between storage design decisions
• Plan a storage architecture that scales to the demands of a virtualized environment
• Use the VMware vSphere Client, esxtop, resxtop, and vscsiStats to monitor storage configuration end to end from a virtual machine disk to a specific VMware vStorage VMFS datastore

Course Outline

Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Introduction to VMware Virtualization

• Hypervisors (the VMkernel) and virtual machines
• Benefits of server virtualization
• Shared storage and the VMware features that depend on it
• Supported storage configurations
• Storage maximums
• VMware storage virtualization stack

VMware Storage Virtualization

• Create a VMFS datastore
• Using extents and Volume Grow to enlarge a VMFS volume
• Strategies for avoiding SCSI reservation conflicts
• Importance of VMFS alignment
• Trade-offs between VMFS and RDM
• Options for creating virtual machine disks and the trade-offs of each option
• VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning and its effect on storage
• Effects of using vStorage Thin Provisioning with storage array thin provisioning

Storage Performance and Troubleshooting

• Storage configuration and its effect on performance
• vSphere utilities to monitor storage latency, capacity, and consumption
• Troubleshooting storage performance problems

SAN Design Considerations

• Storage device names in vSphere
• Importance of configuring consistent host LUN ID numbering
• Calculating I/O operations per second (IOPS) and megabytes per second (MBps) to properly configure LUNs
• Using esxtop or resxtop to determine IOPS and MBps
• Storage network topologies, zoning, and access control in Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS
• Strategies for virtual disk placement
• Interswitch linking and trunking considerations
• Using esxcli to mask LUNs
• Implementing flow control and jumbo frames in IP storage configurations
• Configuring VMware vStorage adaptive queuing
• Manual configuration of storage queues
• VMware ESX™/ESXi boot from SAN

Multipathing Configuration and Managemen

• Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS multipathing
• Managing multipathing algorithms available in vSphere
• Integrating virtual port and target port group support and asymmetric logical unit access arrays into a vSphere environment
• Configuring active-active and active-passive arrays with vSphere

VMware vStorage VMFS and Virtual Machine Snapshots

• LUN replication in a vSphere environment
• Identifying a snapshot LUN in vSphere
• Controlling how the VMkernel handles replicated LUNs
• Using replicated LUNs for backup and disaster recovery
• VMware APIs for Data Protection
• Impact of virtual machine snapshot use on storage architectur

VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration

• Hardware-accelerated locking
• Hardware-accelerated zeroing
• Hardware-accelerated copy
• Enable and disable hardware acceleration
• New performance metrics added to esxtop and resxtop