vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.1 - Documentation - VMware

Working with Datastores 17
Datastores are logical containers, analogous to file systems, that hide specifics of each storage device and
provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine files. Datastores can also be used for storing ISO images,
virtual machine templates, and floppy images.
You use the vSphere Client to access different types of storage devices that your ESXi host discovers and to
deploy datastores on them.
Depending on the type of storage you use, datastores can be backed by the following file system formats:
n Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)
n Network File System (NFS)
After creating datastores, you can organize them in different ways. For example, you can group them into
folders according to business practices. This allows you to assign the same permissions and alarms on the
datastores in the group at one time.
You can also add datastores to datastore clusters. A datastore cluster is a collection of datastores with shared
resources and a shared management interface. When you create a datastore cluster, you can use Storage DRS
to manage storage resources. For information about datastore clusters, see the vSphere Resource Management
documentation.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n “Understanding VMFS Datastores,” on page 154
n “Understanding NFS Datastores,” on page 158
n “Creating Datastores,” on page 159
n “Managing Duplicate VMFS Datastores,” on page 162
n “Upgrading VMFS Datastores,” on page 165
n “Increasing VMFS Datastore Capacity,” on page 167
n “Rename VMFS or NFS Datastores in the vSphere Client,” on page 170
n “Rename VMFS or NFS Datastores in the vSphere Web Client,” on page 170
n “Group VMFS or NFS Datastores in the vSphere Client,” on page 170
n “Unmount VMFS or NFS Datastores,” on page 171
n “Mount VMFS Datastores,” on page 171
n “Delete VMFS Datastores in the vSphere Client,” on page 172
n “Remove VMFS Datastores in the vSphere Web Client,” on page 172
n “Turn off Storage Filters,” on page 173
VMware, Inc. 153