vSphere Storage vocabulary Flashcards
Fibre Channel (FC) What is it? What kind of storage does it apply to?
storage protocol that the SAN uses to transfer data traffic from ESXi host servers to shared storage.
To connect to the FC SAN, your host uses Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs).
What is Internet iSCSI (iSCSI)?
storage protocol that can use Ethernet connections.
To connect to the storage systems, your hosts use hardware iSCSI adapters or software iSCSI initiators with standard network adapters.
What do we mean by local Storage ?
internal hard disks located inside your ESXi host. Also includes external storage systems located outside and connected to the host directly through protocols such as SAS or SATA.
What is Networked Storage?
external storage systems that your ESXi host uses to store virtual machine files remotely. (SAN & NAS)
What do we mean by Target in the context of ESXi?
In the ESXi context, the term target identifies a single storage unit that the host can access.
What is a Datastore?
logical containers that hide specifics of each storage device and provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine files, ISO images, virtual machine templates, and floppy images.
What is a Storage Device and LUN?
A storage device is a volume that is presented to the host from a block storage system and is available for formatting.
Logical Unit Number, or LUN, is a number used to identify a logical unit, which is a device addressed by the SCSI protocol or by Storage Area Network protocols that encapsulate SCSI, such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI.
What are Virtual Disks?
virtual machines use virtual disks to store operating system, application files, and other data associated with its activities.
What are Virtual SCSI controllers?
They are used by a VM to access virtual disks. Include BusLogic Parallel, LSI Logic Parallel, LSI Logic SAS, and VMware Paravirtual.
Each virtual disk appears as if it were a SCSI drive connected to a SCSI controller.
What is VMware vSphere VMFS?
Its the native vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) format
In terms of storage what is Raw Device Mapping (RDM)?
Used when a guest operating system inside a virtual machine requires direct access to a storage device.
What is NFS and what is it used for?
An NFS client built into ESXi uses the Network File System (NFS) protocol over TCP/IP to access an NFS volume that is located on a NAS server.
The ESXi host can mount the volume and use it as an NFS datastore.
Define what Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) is?
Its a framework providing a single control panel across various data services and storage solutions, including vSAN and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes.
Storage policies act as the primary channels through which data is included in data protection and data recovery operations. A storage policy forms the primary logical entity through which a subclient or instance is backed up. Its chief function is to map data from its original location to a physical media.
VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes
an individual virtual machine, not the datastore, becomes a unit of storage management, while storage hardware gains complete control over virtual disk content, layout, and management.
This mapping allows vSphere to offload intensive storage operations such as snapshot, cloning, and replication to the storage system.
What is VMware vSAN?
aggregates local or direct-attached capacity devices of an ESXi host cluster and creates a single storage pool shared across all hosts in the vSAN cluster.
What are vSphere I/O Filters?
Software components that can be installed on ESXi hosts and can offer additional data services to virtual machines.
The Storage APIs are a family of APIs used by third-party hardware, software, and storage providers to develop components that enhance several vSphere features and solutions.
Introduced in vSphere 6.0 U1, VAIO filtering allows users to intercept and manipulate virtual machine I/O regardless of the underlying storage topology. The feature is an alternative to the unsupported kernel-level methods used before to access open-ended data services.
vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)
enable communications between vCenter Server and underlying storage.
Through VASA, storage entities can inform vCenter Server about their configurations, capabilities, and storage health and events.
vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) - Hardware Acceleration APIs
help arrays to integrate with vSphere, so that vSphere can offload certain storage operations to the array.
vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) - Array Thin Provisioning APIs
monitor space use on thin-provisioned storage arrays to prevent out-of-space conditions, and to perform space reclamation.
What is Sphere APIs for Multipathing?
Known as the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)] - allow storage partners to create and deliver multipathing and load-balancing plug-ins that are optimized for each array.
Plug-ins communicate with storage arrays and determine the best path selection strategy to increase I/O performance and reliability from the ESXi host to the storage array.
