Troubleshooting vSphere Storage: All vSphere administrators will benefit big-time from this book because it gives you clear, practical instructions on troubleshooting a whole host of storage problems. From fundamental to advanced techniques, it's all here.

In February 2011, VMware released a technical whitepaper titled Performance Troubleshooting for vSphere 4.1 available at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10179. This document provides a large quantity of information as it pertains to troubleshooting not just storage but also CPU, memory, and network from within a vSphere environment and I highly recommend you read it for yourself. Although the current version of vSphere has changed since its publication, the methodologies, workflows, and recommendations in the document still stand today.

That being said, I will highlight some of the key points of the document as well as explain the importance of applying a troubleshooting methodology within our own environments.

When developing any type of process or workflow, it is very important to start with a broad and holistic view of the overall goal, and the same holds true with a troubleshooting methodology. Although you may find as you move through...

One of the most commonly used tools used to troubleshoot storage is the Storage Views tab inside the vSphere Client. These storage views provide us with an easy and efficient way to determine what is consuming all of our storage as well as giving us a visually appealing graphical representation of how all of our inventory objects are connected as it pertains to storage.

The Storage Views tab is available on three of the four vCenter Server Inventory layouts; Hosts & Clusters, VMs and Templates, and Datastores. Depending on which inventory object is selected, the data being displayed will change. However...

VMware's esxtop command is a very useful tool when it comes to really understanding and troubleshooting our environment. For anyone who has ever used the Linux's top command, you will notice that it is very similar in functionality and usability; however, the difference is that esxtop is only available within the ESXi command-line interface (with the exception of resxtop, which is available from the vSphere Management Assistant) and is geared towards a virtual environment. The esxtop tool provides us with many real-time statistics with regard to how our virtual environment is utilizing resources and performing.

However, esxtop is not just a storage troubleshooting tool. We can see in the following screenshot that esxtop is able to present displays on CPU, memory, network, power, interrupt, disk adapters, disk devices, and individual virtual machine disks. For the scope of this book, we will cover only the storage related displays of esxtop; however, I highly recommend...

Logfiles have long been the norm for providing us with a wealth of information as to what is occurring inside any system. The same holds true with vSphere and ESXi. In fact, vSphere has quite a few logfiles that it uses to report on almost every single event that occurs within our environment. This is the main reason why the first thing that is asked to any customer during a support call is to send the logfile bundle for further analysis. Whether it is the ESXi host, vCenter Server, or the virtual machine itself, each has its own set of logfiles stored in different locations.

We should now have a good idea about some of the tools we can use to troubleshoot vSphere Storage, including Storage Maps/Reports, esxtop, and some of the common logfiles that vCenter and ESXi log information messages to. We should also note the importance of implementing and having a solid understanding of how to create and use a troubleshooting methodology within our own environments.

In the next chapter, we will use the knowledge and tools gained from the previous chapters to troubleshoot issues as they pertain to storage connectivity and visibility.