vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.0 - Documentation - VMware

vSphere Storage
Table 1-3. Datastore Information (Continued)
Datastore Information Description
Path Selection (VMFS datastores) Path selection policy the host uses to access storage. For more information, see
Chapter 17, “Understanding Multipathing and Failover,” on page 151.
Paths (VMFS datastores) Number of paths used to access storage and their status.
Review Datastore Properties
Use the vSphere Client to display all datastores available to the hosts and analyze their properties.
Procedure
1 In Inventory, select Hosts and Clusters.
2 Select a host and click the Configuration tab.
3 In Hardware, select Storage.
4 Click the Datastores view.
5 To display details for a particular datastore, select the datastore from the list.
How Virtual Machines Access Storage
When a virtual machine communicates with its virtual disk stored on a datastore, it issues SCSI commands.
Because datastores can exist on various types of physical storage, these commands are encapsulated into other
forms, depending on the protocol that the ESXi host uses to connect to a storage device.
ESXi supports Fibre Channel (FC), Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and NFS
protocols. Regardless of the type of storage device your host uses, the virtual disk always appears to the virtual
machine as a mounted SCSI device. The virtual disk hides a physical storage layer from the virtual machine’s
operating system. This allows you to run operating systems that are not certified for specific storage equipment,
such as SAN, inside the virtual machine.
The following graphic depicts five virtual machines using different types of storage to illustrate the differences
between each type.
20 VMware, Inc.