Chapter 4. Troubleshooting Storage Contention

Now that we have learned about the various tools we can use to troubleshoot vSphere Storage and tackled the common issues that appear when we are trying to connect to our datastores, it's time for us to look at another type of issue with storage: contention. Storage contention is one of the most common causes of problems inside a virtual environment and is almost always the cause of slowness and performance issues.

One of the biggest benefits of virtualization is consolidation: the ability to take multiple workloads and run them on a smaller number of systems, clustered with shared resources, and with one management interface. That said, as soon as we begin to share these resources, contention is sure to occur. This chapter will help with some of the common issues we face pertaining to storage contention and performance.

This chapter will cover the following:

• Identifying storage contention and performance issues

• Planning—how to properly scale your...