Chapter 1. Understanding vSphere Storage Concepts and Methodologies

Before jumping into the details of how to troubleshoot vSphere Storage, it's best to understand the basics of how storage operates in a virtualized environment. On the whole, ESXi is a very user-friendly, easy-to-use hypervisor. However, when we look at it in terms of troubleshooting and storage, there are a lot ofcomplex scenarios and key pieces of information that we need to know in order to resolve issues as they occur.

This chapter will help us to better understand the fundamentals of how vSphere and ESXi attach to and utilize various types of storage and show us how we can identify our datastores, storage paths, and LUNs within our environment. We will also learn about the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and take a broader look at how an application running in a virtual machine accesses storage.

The topics that we'll be covering in this chapter are:

• Storage virtualization

• Supported filesystems

• Storage naming

• The vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture

• An I/O request—from start to finish