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You're reading from VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook If you prefer practice to theory then this is the ideal book for learning how to install and configure VMware vSphere components. Packed with recipes, it's a hands-on tutorial and reference guide for this unbeatable virtualization product.

Product type Paperback

Published in Jul 2013

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781849684026

Length 466 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

vSphere

Concepts

Cloud Computing

Author (1):

Abhilash G B

View More author details

Table of Contents (20) Chapters

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

1. Upgrading to vSphere 5.1 FREE CHAPTER

2. Performing a Fresh Installation of vSphere 5.1

3. vSphere Auto Deploy

4. ESXi Image Builder

5. Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores

6. Managing iSCSI and NFS Storage

7. Profile-driven Storage and Storage I/O Control

8. Configuring the vSphere Network

9. Creating and Managing Virtual Machines

10. Configuring vSphere HA

11. Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC

12. Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager

13. Using vSphere Management Assistant (vMA 5.1)

Index

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...