VMware

Best Practices Guides

VMware VMFS: Technical Overview & Best Practices

This paper gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. The paper highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.

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Recommendations for Aligning VMFS Partitions

Partition alignment is a known issue in physical file systems, and its remedy is well-documented. This paper lists a summary of the results of our testing, recommendations for VMware VMFS partition alignment, and the steps needed to create aligned VMware VMFS partitions.

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VMware Consolidated Backup

This white paper is intended to enhance the reader's knowledge by discussing deployment considerations, best practices recommendations, and troubleshooting tips when implementing VMware Consolidated Backup. The white paper is a collection of information gathered by real world field implementations, expertise of VMware Professional Services and in-house testing. Insightful information useful in troubleshooting your environment is also provided.

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Additional Resources

What's New for Storage in Virtual Infrastructure 3

The newest features in VMware Infrastructure 3 bring new levels of flexibility and connectivity options for utilizing shared storage resources in your virtualization environment. This white paper provides an overview of new capabilities such as Storage VMotion and support for InfiniBand.

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HCL: Storage Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.x

This guide describes the combination of HBAs (host bus adapters) and storage devices currently tested by VMware and its storage partners.

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iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide

This paper is designed to help you understand the design considerations and deployment options for deploying VMware Infrastructure 3 using iSCSI storage.

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Performance Characteristics of VMFS and RDM

This study provides performance characterization of the various disk access management methods supported by VMware ESX so you can select the appropriate disk access method for your application.

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Take the Next Step

Explore your storage connectivity options when using Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NAS equipment or learn more about VMware storage-related products such as VMware Storage VMotion and VMware VMFS.