Introduction
To make the best use of your vSphere environment, your ESXi hosts need access to shared storage. The shared storage is generally presented to an ESXi host from a storage array (FC/iSCSI/NAS) and the storage entities are presented in the form of a LUN.
In this chapter, we learn how to create and manage VMFS datastores.
Datastore is the vSphere term for a volume presented to an ESXi. The volume can be a VMFS volume on a LUN or an NFS mount.
A LUN presented from an FC/iSCSI/DAS array can be formatted using the VMware's proprietary filesystem called VMFS. The following is a diagram from the VMware vSphere® VMFS technical whitepaper available at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf:
The current version of VMFS is Version 5. Unlike the traditional filesystems supported by the Windows/Linux operating system, VMFS will let more than one host have simultaneous read/write access to the volume. To make sure that a VM or its files are not simultaneously accessed by more...
