Storage
June 19th, 2010
Common
- What Is New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage
- vStorage Multi Paths Options in vSphere
- Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
- vSphere and 2TB LUNs – changes from VI3.x
- A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere
- vSphere Storage: Features and Enhancements
- Configuring disks to use VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters
- IOps?
- Storage Basics – Part I: An Introduction
- Storage Basics – Part II: IOPS
- Storage Basics – Part III: RAID
- Best practices for HP EVA, vSphere 4 and Round Robin multi-pathing
- Virtual Disks and SCSI Commands
- Increasing the queue depth?
- Maximizing Storage Performance With VMWare ESX and Virtual Server Environments
- UML diagram your VM, vdisks and snapshots
- Why Does Cloning A VM From Template Take A Long Time?
- Storage Short Take #6
Configuration
- How to connect to a iSCSI target
- How to mask paths in vSphere
- Queuedepth and wahts next
- Best practice in LUN design
- Configure VMware ESX(i) Round Robin on EMC Storage
- Storage Masking?
Alignment
FC / iSCSI / NFS
VMFS
- VMFS metadata size
- Block sizes think before you decide
- Max amount of VMs per VMFS volume
- VMFS lunsize
- Block sizes and growing your VMFS
- VMFS UUID numbering explained
- VMFS Storage runs full and VMs are in an inconsistent state
- Recovering a lost partition table on a VMFS volume
RDM (Raw Device Mapping)
pvSCSI
- Use PVSCSI or not for lower intensive workloads
- VMware pvSCSI – When and when not to use it
- More Bang for Your Buck with PVSCSI (Part 1)
- More Bang for your Buck with PVSCSI (Part 2)
- Do I choose the PVSCSI or LSI Logic adapter for low IO intensive workloads?
- New whitepaper released on pvSCSI
Snapshot
- vSphere VM snapshots and block size
- How big can snapshots grow
- Performance impact when using VMware snapshots
- Creating a snapshot for a VM fails with error: File is larger than maximum file size supported (1012384)
- VMDK snapshots and importance of cid chains
- Troubleshooting Virtual Machine snapshot problems (Part 1)
- Troubleshooting Virtual Machine snapshot problems (Part 2)
- Recovering from lost snapshot on RDM
- Troubleshooting Virtual Machine snapshot problems (Part 3)
Performance / Monitoring
- VMware and Netapp protocol performance report
- Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE
- FC vs NFS vs iSCSI
- VMFS vs RDM (vs VMDirectPath and other solutions)
- VMware and Netapp protocol performance report
- Disk partition alignment
- Storage System Performance Analysis with Iometer
- Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN
- Check your VM’s alignment for Better Performance
- Converting vscsiStats data into Excel charts
- Inconsistent Windows VM performance when disks are located on shared storage
- Performance Troubleshooting VMware vSphere – Storage
VMDK
- Extend vmdk of a windows vm with Dell Extpart tool (download tool: link1, link2)
- Choosing a virtual disk type for VMware ESX: Raw, thick and thin disks
- VMDK virtual disk type
- Determining if a VMDK is zeroedthick or eagerzeroedthick
- How to shrink a virtual disk files and disable shrinking
- How to expand a VMDK and extend a partition in for VMware ESX
Storage VMotion
Thin Provisioning
- Performance Study of VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning
- Thin on Thin? Where should you do Thin Provisioning – vSphere 4.0 or Array-Level?
- Pointers for using thin-provisioned disks
- VMware Thin Provisioning within ESX 4.0
- Why Thin Provisioning Is Not The Holy Grail for Utilisation
- VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics
- VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
- Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere
- Living Thin in a Fat World
- Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere
- Storage VMotion and moving to a Thin Provisioned disk
- VMware vSphere 4 Thin Provisioning: Pros & Cons
- Performance thin provisioning on VMFS
- Reclaiming unused VMDK space with storage thin provisioning