Another n00b storage question....

tdean

im having trouble differentiating between datastores, disk to disk storage, the physical servers the vm's live on and storage appliances like EMC's Clariion etc products.

datastores = luns that are sections of the hard drives the ESX host is installed on?

disk to disk storage = a seperate lan (iscsi) configured to allow for data back up instead of disk to tape? this is set up in the backup software interface and points to something like an EMC Clariion device?

physical servers = HP/Dell etc... your ESX hosts live here. the local hd space is used only for multiple vm's?

storage appliances = just a "huge hard drive" with raid features etc. this is for data backup storage only? or are vm's actually run from these?

tdean

looks like i stumped a few people.... i dont feel so bad not knowing anymore.

MentholMoose

Datastores are where VM files live... the VMX, VMDK(s), etc. It can be storage local to a host (e.g. a RAID array in an ESX host), a LUN on an FC or iSCSI SAN, or an NFS share.

Disk to disk is a backup methodology; the source, i.e. the original files, is disk based, and the backup location is also disk based (as opposed to tape, which is common).

Physical servers are what ESX/ESXi run on. The local storage could be used for VM files (datastores), or not (especially in enterprise implementations where datastores are only on shared storage). VMs run on ESX hosts, but they can be stored on a datastore anywhere.

Storage appliance is a generic term for some kind of storage device. It could be a SAN (FC or iSCSI) or run NFS, in which case datastores could be there, or it could be some type of storage used for backup. The physical device (typically) won't be running ESX so VMs won't execute on it.

MentholMoose

Hopefully my post didn't confuse you even more. There are a lot of resources for learning the basics of vSphere, and one that is free and good is Mike Laverick's vSphere Videos/Demos. You can watch them all in an afternoon and you will get a decent understanding of the basics, but if you setup a simple lab and follow along you will probably understand even more. You can do the vSphere evaluation with the written evaluation guide and documentation, but it is nice to have a visual reference. If you have a decent enough desktop PC, you can use VMware Workstation to evaluate vSphere (you can use the Workstation evaluation, too ).

tdean

oh no... thank you. i have been gathering knowledge here and there and it just happened that i was watching a cbt that tied all this together the day after i posted my reply. thanks again for your replies, im sure to have questions, i am going to go for this cert hopefully by summer.