Troubleshooting vSphere storage / Mike Preston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Preston, Mike.

Series:

Professional expertise distilled

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

VMware vSphere.

Virtual computer systems.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (150 p.)

Edition:

1st edition

Other Title:

Become a master at troubleshooting and solving common storage issues in your vSphere environment

Place of Publication:

Birmingham : Packt Publishing, 2013.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Biography/History:

Preston Mike: Mike Preston is an IT professional and an overall tech enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada. He has held all sorts of IT titles over the last 15 years including Network Technician, Systems Administrator, Programmer Analyst, Web Developer, and Systems Engineer in all sorts of different verticals, from sales to consulting. Currently, he is working as a Systems Analyst supporting the education market near his home in Belleville, Ontario. Mike has always had an intense passion for sharing his skills, solutions, and work with various online communities, most recently focusing on the virtualization communities. He is an avid blogger at blog. mwpreston. net and participates in many discussions on Twitter (@mwpreston). It's his passion for sharing within the virtualization community which has led to Mike receiving the vExpert award for 2012 and 2013. Mike has presented at VMworld, VMUGs, and various virtualization conferences on numerous times both as a customer and an overall evangelist and has published different whitepapers and articles for various tech websites. His commitment to giving back to the community has resulted in his most recent venture of becoming a Toronto VMUG co-leader. He is a VMware Certified Professional in Datacenter Virtualization on both Version 4 and 5 of vSphere and is currently pursuing his VCAP5-DCA, which he hopes to accomplish by 2014.

Summary:

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. Identify key issues that affect vSphere storage visibility, performance, and capacity Comprehend the storage metrics and statistics that are collected in vSphere Get acquainted with the many vSphere features that can proactively protect your environment In Detail Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‘jack of all trades’ in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur. This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment. This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today’s data centers. You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can’t see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.

Contents:

Intro

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage

Table of Contents

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgment

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

Why Subscribe?

Free Access for Packt account holders

Instant Updates on New Packt Books

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Understanding vSphere Storage Concepts and Methodologies

Storage virtualization

Supported filesystems

VMFS

NFS

Raw disk

Storage naming

Viewing device identifiers

Within the vSphere Client

Within ESXi Shell

The many ways vSphere identifies storage

Friendly names

Identifiers

NAA identifiers

T10 identifiers

IQN identifiers

MPX identifiers

Runtime names

The vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) roles and commands

Multipathing Plugin - the VMware Native Multipathing Plugin roles and commands

Storage Array Type Plugin roles and commands

Path Selection Plugin roles and commands

An I/O request - from start to finish

Summary

2. Commonly Used Tools for Troubleshooting Storage

The vSphere troubleshooting methodology

vCenter Storage Views (Reports and Maps)

Reports

Maps

Using esxtop/resxtop

Switching displays

Field customization

Refresh interval

Logfiles used in vSphere Storage troubleshooting

ESXi logging

Viewing ESXi logs

vCenter Server logging

Virtual machine logging

3. Troubleshooting Storage Visibility

Common storage visibility issues across block transport types

ESXi claim rules and LUN masking

Troubleshooting paths and path selection

vCenter Server Storage filters.

Disk resignaturing

LUN numbering

Troubleshooting Fibre Channel storage visibility

Registered State Change Notification (RSCN)

Identifying and interpreting Fibre Channel connection issues in the logs

Troubleshooting IP storage visibility

Verifying network connectivity to our iSCSI and NFS array

iSCSI and NFS port requirements

CHAP authentication

Identifying and interpreting iSCSI storage connection issues in the logs

Troubleshooting NFS storage

NFS ACLs

NFS permissions

Identifying and interpreting NFS storage connection issues in the logs

4. Troubleshooting Storage Contention

Identifying storage contention and performance issues

Disk adapter latency statistics

Disk device latency statistics

Virtual machine latency statistics

Using vCenter alarms to monitor latency

Planning - how to properly scale your storage

Calculating IOPs requirements

Calculating the number of disks required

How do we know when we need more IOPs?

vSphere features to help with latency, contention, placement, and compliance

Profile-Driven Storage

Storage DRS for performance

SCSI reservation conflicts

Monitoring SCSI reservation conflicts with esxtop

Resolving excessive SCSI resolutions

Storage queuing in vSphere

OS queue

Adapter queue

Per-LUN queue

Viewing queues in ESXi

vSphere Storage I/O Control

Configuring Storage I/O Control

Troubleshooting NAS/iSCSI storage performance

iSCSI port binding and Round Robin path policy

Jumbo Frames and MTU size

5. Troubleshooting Storage Capacity and Overcommitment

Monitoring datastore usage

Thin Provisioning

Array thin provisioning

Hypervisor (VMDK) thin provisioning

Monitoring Thin Provisioning

Snapshots

Understanding vSphere Snapshots

Monitoring snapshot disk usage.

Datastore file management

Virtual machine swap files

Increasing the size of our datastores

Growing a VMFS datastore

Adding an extent to a VMFS datastore

Balancing capacity with Storage DRS

A. Troubleshooting Steps

You cannot connect to your iSCSI storage

Have all the network requirements for your iSCSI connection been met?

Various things to check on ESXi

Have all CHAP requirements been met?

Has there been any advanced settings dealing with iSCSI incorrectly configured?

Further check the logs for iSCSI-related errors

You cannot connect to your NFS storage

Have all the network requirements for you NFS connection been met?

Check the settings on your NFS array

Has there been any advanced settings dealing with NFS incorrectly configured?

Further check the logs for NFS related errors

You cannot connect to your Fibre Channel Storage

Fibre Channel switch zoning

Check paths to storage array/PSP

Check the storage array

Further check the logs for Fibre Channel related errors

My storage/virtual machine is slow

Inspect latency values to further pinpoint where performance degradation is occurring

Ensure that your storage array is handling the demand

B. Statistics of esxtop

Overview of esxtop's interactive commands

Activating different displays

Field selection

Field order

Filtering and sorting the displayed objects

Other useful information

esxtop statistics

C. iSCSI Error Codes

Interpreting software iSCSI error codes

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed December 19, 2013).

ISBN:

9781782172079

1782172076

OCLC:

863824713