New Training: vSphere Storage Fault Tolerance

In this 7-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Keith Barker describes and demonstrates several options for implementing fault tolerance regarding shared storage in a vSphere environment. Watch this new VMware training.

Watch the full course: VMware Certified Professional

This training includes:

• 7 videos

• 55 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Intro to Storage Fault Tolerance

• Storage FT Overview

• Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)

• iSCSI Multipath Overview

• Implement iSCSI Multipath

• Hands on Lab iSCSI Multipathing

• iSCSI Multi-path Lab Walkthrough

What Shared Storage Options Can Be Used With Fault-Tolerant Enabled vSphere Virtual Machines

vSphere Fault Tolerance features are a great way to ensure high availability for virtual machines. It's best used for mission-critical applications or when clustering is not easy to configure. Enabling fault-tolerance on VMs in vSphere has limitations, though. These limitations include what storage options can be used with VMs.

First, vSphere fault tolerance cannot be used with vStorage. If you need to perform a vStorage activity for a VM, fault tolerance needs to be disabled for that VM first.

Once fault tolerance is enabled, the guest virtual machines have a few options for shared storage:

• Fibre Channel

• Internet Small Computer System Interface (ISCSI)

• Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE

• Network Attached Storage (NAS)

All of these shared storage options are network-based solutions. Each has its pros and cons. For instance, fiber solutions will offer the best performance but come with a higher cost. ISCSI is much easier to set up and is standard today, but ISCSI can suffer from higher latency. NAS solutions are easy and cheap to set up but offer overall less performance.