The storage platform in a virtual infrastructure serves as most important foundation piece of the infrastructure. There are certainly many options to choose from. Those storage options generally fall into two main categories. Block storage and File System storage. Let’s take a look at these two categories.
Block Storage
This method of providing shared storage to a VMware cluster has been supported the longest. At its core, block storage presents a set of physical disks as a logical disk to a host (ESX server in this case). This is a very well understood method of providing storage for the virtual infrastructure. There are a couple of protocols that we can use to provide this type of storage: Fibre Channel and iSCSI.
Fibre Channel
- Fibre Channel uses a dedicated Fibre Channel fabric to provide connectivity for the storage.
- Fibre Channel was built from the ground up as a storage protocol.
- Fibre Channel is the most mature protocol for block storage presentation.
iSCSI
- iSCSI can use the same network fabric as your LAN servers. However, it is best to use a separate Ethernet fabric.
- iSCSI is an IP based storage protocol that utilizes the existing TCP/IP stack.
- iSCSI is a relatively new protocol for block storage.
The …
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