Designing the host for a highly available and high-performance storage
VMware ESXi enables multiple hosts to share the same physical storage through its optimized storage stack and VMware VMFS-distributed filesystem. Centralized storage of VMs can be accomplished using VMFS and/or NFS. Centralized storage enables virtualization capabilities, such as VMware vMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and VMware High Availability.
Several factors have an effect on storage performance:
- Storage protocols
- Proper configuration of your host device and storage devices
- Load balancing across available storage processors
- Storage queues
Getting ready
To step through this recipe, you will need one or more running ESXi Servers, an HBA card, an NIC card, and a Fibre Channel (FC) or an iSCSI storage. No other prerequisites are required.
How to do it...
High availability requires at least two HBA connections to provide redundant paths to the SAN or storage system.
Follow these steps to design high-performing...