To tap into some of VMware vSphere’s advanced features such as VMotion, fault tolerance, high availability and the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, you need to have shared storage for all of your hosts. vSphere’s proprietary VMFS file system uses a special locking mechanism to allow multiple hosts to connect to the same shared storage volumes and the virtual machines (VMs) on them. Traditionally, this meant you had to implement an expensive Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure, but iSCSI and NFS network storage are now more affordable alternatives.
Focusing on iSCSI, we’ll describe how to set it up and configure it properly for vSphere hosts, as well as provide some tips and best practices for using iSCSI storage with vSphere. In addition, we’ve included the results of a performance benchmarking test for the iSCSI/vSphere pairing, with performance comparisons of the various configurations.
Read the full article in the August 2010 issue of Storage Magazine at searchstorage.com…
