vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.1 - Documentation - VMware

vSphere Storage
n Ensure that the Fibre Channel HBAs are installed in the correct slots in the host, based on slot and bus
speed. Balance PCI bus load among the available busses in the server.
n Become familiar with the various monitor points in your storage network, at all visibility points, including
host's performance charts, FC switch statistics, and storage performance statistics.
n Be cautious when changing IDs of the LUNs that have VMFS datastores being used by your ESXi host. If
you change the ID, the datastore becomes inactive and its virtual machines fail. You can resignature the
datastore to make it active again. See “Managing Duplicate VMFS Datastores,” on page 162.
If there are no running virtual machines on the VMFS datastore, after you change the ID of the LUN, you
must use rescan to reset the ID on your host. For information on using rescan, see “Storage Refresh and
Rescan Operations,” on page 135.
Disable Automatic Host Registration
When you use EMC CLARiiON or Invista arrays for storage, it is required that the hosts register with the
arrays. ESXi performs automatic host registration by sending the host's name and IP address to the array. If
you prefer to perform manual registration using storage management software, disable the ESXi autoregistration
feature.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Client, select the host in the inventory panel.
2 Click the Configuration tab and click Advanced Settings under Software.
3 Click Disk in the left panel and scroll down to Disk.EnableNaviReg on the right.
4 Change the default value to 0.
This disables the automatic host registration enabled by default.
Disable Automatic Host Registration in the vSphere Web Client
When you use EMC CLARiiON or Invista arrays for storage, it is required that the hosts register with the
arrays. ESXi performs automatic host registration by sending the host's name and IP address to the array. If
you prefer to perform manual registration using storage management software, disable the ESXi autoregistration
feature.
Procedure
1 Browse to the host in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
2 Click the Manage tab, and click Settings.
3 Under System, click Advanced System Settings.
4 Under Advanced System Settings, select the Disk.EnableNaviReg parameter and click the Edit icon.
5 Change the value to 0.
This disables the automatic host registration enabled by default.
Optimizing Fibre Channel SAN Storage Performance
Several factors contribute to optimizing a typical SAN environment.
If the environment is properly configured, the SAN fabric components (particularly the SAN switches) are
only minor contributors because of their low latencies relative to servers and storage arrays. Make sure that
the paths through the switch fabric are not saturated, that is, that the switch fabric is running at the highest
throughput.
68 VMware, Inc.