Chapter 3. Troubleshooting Storage Visibility

Now that we have a solid understanding of how vSphere handles storage as well as a lot of the common tools we can use to troubleshoot and view storage, it's time to dive deep into the primary topic of this book which is troubleshooting vSphere Storage. In this chapter, we will walk through some of the common troubleshooting steps to take when LUNs are not visible to our ESXi hosts. We will also cover how to troubleshoot individual Fibre Channel paths to storage, storage claim rules, and LUN masking, as well as the process of resignaturing a LUN.

From there, we will move into IP storage and discuss the various troubleshooting steps to undertake when dealing with both iSCSI and NFS visibility issues.

This chapter covers the following:

• Common storage visibility issues across block transport types

  • ESXi claim rules and Logical Unit Number (LUN) masking

  • Troubleshooting paths and path selection

  • vCenter Server Storage filters

  • Disk resignaturing

  • LUN numbering...