THE ONLY AUTHORITATIVE, COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO VSPHERE STORAGE IMPLEMENTATION AND MANAGEMENT

Effective VMware virtualization storage planning and management has become crucial-but it can be extremely complex. Now, the leading VMware expert on storage completely demystifies the "black box" of vSphere storage and provides illustrated, step-by-step procedures for performing every key task associated with it. You'll gain the deep understanding you need to make better storage decisions, solve problems, and keep problems from occurring in the first place.

Mostafa Khalil presents techniques based on years of personal experience helping customers troubleshoot storage in their vSphere production environments. With more experience than anyone else in the field, he combines expert guidelines, insights for better architectural design, best practices for both planning and management, common configuration details, and deep dives into both vSphere and third-party storage.

Storage Implementation in vSphere® 5.0 fully explains each storage connectivity choice and protocol supported by VMware, introduces Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA), and shows how to build on PSA with multipathing, failover, and ALUA. It thoroughly introduces Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) and VMDirectPath I/O, and shows how to drive powerful improvements in performance, flexibility, and manageability with VMFS 5 and VAAI.

COVERAGE INCLUDES

• Understanding how FC, FCoE, and iSCSI interact with VMware vSphere 5
• Implementing specific VMware capabilities on storage hardware from each leading vendor
• Avoiding, recognizing, and fixing misconfigurations and other problems
• Using third-party MPIO plug-ins certified with vSphere 5 and PSA
• Maximizing availability through multipathing and failover
• Implementing fixed and round-robin multipathing on arrays with ALUA support
• Monitoring and optimizing virtual storage performance
• Managing vSphere-compatible file systems: VMFS and NFS
• Taking full advantage of VMDirectPath I/O
• Implementing heterogeneous storage configurations
• Presenting abstracted storage through virtual disks and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)
• Using VMFS 5 to simplify management and improve scalability in large-scale environments
• Sharing storage and migrating more easily across multiple VMware vSphere instances
• Optimizing storage performance with VAAI-compliant devices

Mostafa Khalil, Senior Staff Engineer with VMware Global Support Services, specializes in storage integration for virtual environments. He has worked for VMware for 13 years and supported all VMware virtualization products since Workstation for Linux 1.0 beta. Khalil has worked on most enterprise storage vendors' solutions and received engineering-level training for many of them. He has presented at every VMworld, and at VMware Partner Exchange, VMware User Group, and USENIX.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-79993-7

ISBN-10: 0-321-79993-3

Mostafa Khalil is a senior staff engineer at VMware. He is a senior member of VMware Global Support Services and has worked for VMware for more than 13 years. Prior to joining VMware, he worked at Lotus/IBM. A native of Egypt, Mostafa graduated from the Al-Azhar University's School of Medicine, and practiced medicine in Cairo. He became intrigued by the mini computer system used in his medical practice and began to educate himself about computing and networking technologies. After moving to the United States, Mostafa continued to focus on computing and acquired several professional certifications. He is certified as VCDX (3, 4, & 5), VCAP (4 & 5)-DCD, VCAP4-DCA, VCP (2, 3, 4, & 5), MCSE, Master CNE, HP ASE, IBM CSE, and Lotus CLP. As storage became a central element in the virtualization environment, Mostafa became an expert in this field and delivered several seminars and troubleshooting workshops at various VMware public events in the United States and around the world.

Part I: Storage Protocols and Block Devices

Chapter 1 Storage Types 1

History of Storage 1

Birth of the Hard Disks 4

Along Comes SCSI 4

PATA and SATA-SCSI's Distant Cousins? 5

Units of Measuring Storage Capacity 7

Permanent Storage Media Relevant to vSphere 5 8

Chapter 2 Fibre Channel Storage Connectivity 11

SCSI Standards and Protocols 11

SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 Standards 11

Fibre Channel Protocol 12

Decoding EMC Symmetrix WWPN 25

Locating Targets' WWNN and WWPN Seen by vSphere 5 Hosts 27

SAN Topology 30

Fabric Switches 35

FC Zoning 37

Designing Storage with No Single Points of Failure 41

Chapter 3 FCoE Storage Connectivity 49

FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) 49

FCoE Initialization Protocol 51

FCoE Initiators 54

Hardware FCoE Adapter 54

Software FCoE Adapter 55

Overcoming Ethernet Limitations 56

Flow Control in FCoE 57

Protocols Required for FCoE 58

Priority-Based Flow Control 58

Enhanced Transmission Selection 58

Data Center Bridging Exchange 59

10GigE - A Large Pipeline 59

802.1p Tag 60

Hardware FCoE Adapters 62

How SW FCoE Is Implemented in ESXi 5 62

Configuring FCoE Network Connections 64

Enabling Software FCoE Adapter 68

Removing or Disabling a Software FCoE Adapter 71

Using the UI to Remove the SW FCoE Adapter 71

Using the CLI to Remove the SW FCoE Adapter 72

Troubleshooting FCoE 73

ESXCLI 73

FCoE-Related Logs 76

Parting Tips 82

Chapter 4 iSCSI Storage Connectivity 85

iSCSI Protocol 85

Chapter 5 vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) 165

Native Multipathing 166

Storage Array Type Plug-in (SATP) 167

How to List SATPs on an ESXi 5 Host 168

Path Selection Plugin (PSP) 169

How to List PSPs on an ESXi 5 Host 170

Third-Party Plug-ins 171

Multipathing Plugins (MPPs) 172

Anatomy of PSA Components 173

I/O Flow Through PSA and NMP 174

Classification of Arrays Based on How They Handle I/O 175

Paths and Path States 176

Preferred Path Setting 176

Flow of I/O Through NMP 178

Listing Multipath Details 179

Listing Paths to a LUN Using the UI 179

Listing Paths to a LUN Using the Command-Line Interface (CLI) 183

Identifying Path States and on Which Path the I/O Is Sent-FC 186

Example of Listing Paths to an iSCSI-Attached Device 187

Identifying Path States and on Which Path the I/O Is Sent-iSCSI 190

Example of Listing Paths to an FCoE-Attached Device 190

Identifying Path States and on Which Path the I/O Is Sent-FC 192

Claim Rules 192

MP Claim Rules 193

Plug-in Registration 196

SATP Claim Rules 197

Modifying PSA Plug-in Configurations Using the UI 201

Which PSA Configurations Can Be Modified Using the UI? 202

Modifying PSA Plug-ins Using the CLI 204

Available CLI Tools and Their Options 204

Adding a PSA Claim Rule 206

How to Delete a Claim Rule 215

How to Mask Paths to a Certain LUN 217

How to Unmask a LUN 219

Changing PSP Assignment via the CLI 220

Chapter 6 ALUA 227

ALUA Definition 228