WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.500 Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. 00:00:02.500 --> 00:00:04.300 Now let's look at VMFS datastores. 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:12.400 So, to create a new datastore, you're going to select the host that you want to create the datastore on, right? 00:00:12.400 --> 00:00:18.400 You go to storage, you're going to say new datastore, select the VMFS file system. 00:00:18.400 --> 00:00:19.700 You're going to give it a name. 00:00:19.700 --> 00:00:24.400 You're going to give a location where you want this to be available to, 00:00:24.400 --> 00:00:26.299 and then select which devices it will be used. 00:00:26.299 --> 00:00:29.000 Like if you're going to be a certain partition, how much of the partition. 00:00:29.100 --> 00:00:35.200 You can set some information about like the size of it and, you know, 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:38.000 what file system version you want to use, some things like that. 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:39.099 In a moment, we'll do a demo. 00:00:39.099 --> 00:00:42.599 We'll walk through actually creating the file system, and you'll see how it's done. 00:00:42.599 --> 00:00:44.000 You can go to the host and do it. 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:51.099 You can also go to your actual datastore's area in vSphere, and you can create a datastore from there as well. 00:00:55.400 --> 00:00:56.700 So, create the datastore. 00:00:56.799 --> 00:00:59.700 One of the things you're going to decide is what version of VMFS do you want to use. 00:00:59.700 --> 00:01:01.400 Do you want to use version 6 or version 5? 00:01:01.400 --> 00:01:04.800 You want to make sure whatever version you pick is compatible with all your hosts. 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:08.199 If you're running older hosts, it'd have to be a much older host. 00:01:08.199 --> 00:01:10.099 They may not support version 6. 00:01:10.099 --> 00:01:14.699 But normally, you do want to use the most current version that you can in your environment. 00:01:14.699 --> 00:01:17.199 So, most of the time, you probably want to use version 6. 00:01:17.199 --> 00:01:21.500 Version 5 allowed you to use LUNs that were greater than 2 terabytes. 00:01:21.500 --> 00:01:25.099 Version 6 also allows for automatic space reclamation. 00:01:25.099 --> 00:01:32.300 And what space reclamation means is, basically, let's say we have a VMFS file, right? 00:01:32.300 --> 00:01:34.699 I'm sorry, sorry, a VMDK file. 00:01:34.699 --> 00:01:40.599 And your VMDK file is this virtual disk for a VM, and it has grown and grown and grown and grown. 00:01:40.599 --> 00:01:42.800 And then you're like, this is really old data. 00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:46.099 I don't need this data on my storage anymore. 00:01:46.099 --> 00:01:51.800 And you go in and you delete, you know, 800 gigs of data, or maybe you archive it, you know, 00:01:51.800 --> 00:01:54.900 hopefully archived it someplace else and just delete it. 00:01:54.900 --> 00:01:58.400 And you removed it from this virtual machine. 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:01.199 Then you go to your SAN and say, I just deleted 800 gigs. 00:02:01.199 --> 00:02:04.500 I should have 800 gigs, and you don't have 800 gigs. 00:02:04.500 --> 00:02:05.199 Why? 00:02:05.199 --> 00:02:12.199 Because all that data is still actually there, and it doesn't shrink that file, right? 00:02:12.199 --> 00:02:24.699 So, there's a way you can actually go in and tell your VM that you want to zero out all the blocks that are no longer used by the NTFS file system. 00:02:24.699 --> 00:02:35.300 And then your SAN with VMFS version 6 can go in and reclaim all those zeroed out blocks and shrink that VMDK file. 00:02:35.300 --> 00:02:39.199 So, you can go in there and you can reclaim space that's been freed up. 00:02:39.199 --> 00:02:46.000 Now, if you just delete a VMDK file, the SAN sees that VMDK file is gone and it's going to reclaim it. 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:51.399 But it's not going to actually shrink it because data within the file was deleted, right? 00:02:51.399 --> 00:02:55.699 And that's what we're talking about is what's happening inside of these VMDK files. 00:02:55.699 --> 00:03:02.800 And that's always been the challenge with virtualization is what's happening inside this virtual container? 00:03:02.800 --> 00:03:06.199 What's happening with the CPU and the memory and the RAM? 00:03:06.199 --> 00:03:13.699 And you can log into each VM and look, but, you know, it's not always as insightful as you might want it to be. 00:03:13.699 --> 00:03:20.600 There are a lot of tools now that will actually give you a lot of insight as to why CPU looks so high in a virtual machine. 00:03:20.600 --> 00:03:21.500 What else is happening? 00:03:21.500 --> 00:03:25.000 And, you know, did the space that's being used and how old is this space? 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:27.800 And what can be, you know, reclaimed and a bunch of things like that. 00:03:27.800 --> 00:03:30.100 There's a lot of tools for helping you manage that. 00:03:30.100 --> 00:03:35.199 Things that used to be kind of hidden by the hypervisor level are now much, much easier to see. 00:03:35.199 --> 00:03:39.800 Because of the enhancements in vSphere, because of third-party tools that are more enhanced, 00:03:39.800 --> 00:03:47.399 because also vendors like Microsoft are making their operating systems much more virtualization-friendly 00:03:47.399 --> 00:03:50.300 because they know most of the time they are virtualized. 00:03:50.300 --> 00:03:52.100 Their servers, not their desktops, obviously. 00:03:52.100 --> 00:03:55.000 Some of their desktops, you know, if you're doing virtual desktops. 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:58.300 But their servers a lot of times are virtualized. 00:03:58.300 --> 00:04:01.100 And so they want to be more friendly to that environment. 00:04:01.100 --> 00:04:01.600 Okay? 00:04:01.600 --> 00:04:07.600 So choose what version of VMFS you're going to use, the size, the block size you're going to use, 00:04:07.600 --> 00:04:13.199 any reclamation parameters you're going to configure, and how will it partition the datastore. 00:04:13.199 --> 00:04:17.600 Hopefully, we're just going to use like all the free space that's on there. 00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:23.500 But you can choose to use a portion or you can also, we'll talk about this in a moment, 00:04:23.500 --> 00:04:28.700 add to an already existing datastore with an extent. 00:04:28.700 --> 00:04:34.399 To mount a datastore that already exists, you can right-click on the datastore and you can say to select 00:04:34.399 --> 00:04:37.600 mount the datastore and then choose the host that you want to mount to. 00:04:37.600 --> 00:04:43.799 So if you created on one host and there's 15 more in there, you could go to each one and you could tell it to scan, 00:04:43.799 --> 00:04:46.600 and scan, and scan, and they should see it and bring it back up again. 00:04:46.600 --> 00:04:51.500 But you can also go to the datastore and just say we want to right now tell all these hosts to use this new datastore. 00:04:51.500 --> 00:04:56.500 And it'll just trigger them all to scan and find that datastore. 00:04:56.500 --> 00:04:59.500 To extend a datastore, this is what we were talking about before. 00:04:59.500 --> 00:05:00.700 Let's say we have a LUN. 00:05:00.700 --> 00:05:06.399 Now, normally when you create a datastore, you're probably going to use all the space that's on that LUN for that datastore. 00:05:06.399 --> 00:05:13.899 You're not going to leave free space there because you know that you're not going to create another different datastore on that LUN. 00:05:13.899 --> 00:05:15.799 So why would you leave free space? 00:05:15.799 --> 00:05:18.399 But what could happen is you did use up all the space. 00:05:18.399 --> 00:05:22.000 You used up all 500 gigs of space on that LUN. 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.100 And then the LUN starts running low on space. 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:26.899 So now you need a bigger datastore. 00:05:26.899 --> 00:05:29.100 What you can do is go into the SAN. 00:05:29.100 --> 00:05:32.299 You can increase the size of the LUN. 00:05:32.299 --> 00:05:41.700 And when you go into your ESXi host, it will show you a 1 terabyte LUN with a 500 gig datastore. 00:05:41.700 --> 00:05:46.100 Now you can add that additional 500 gigs with an extend. 00:05:46.100 --> 00:05:50.100 So an extend is going to basically allow more space on that datastore. 00:05:50.100 --> 00:05:54.899 Now, it's not like RAID to where if you have two extends, it's going to write faster because it's writing to both. 00:05:54.899 --> 00:05:56.600 It's going to fill up the first one. 00:05:56.600 --> 00:06:00.200 When that first one's full, it goes to the next one and fills up the next one. 00:06:00.200 --> 00:06:01.000 Okay? 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:05.100 So it doesn't improve performance or anything like that. 00:06:05.100 --> 00:06:08.799 It allows you to grow a VMFS datastore. 00:06:08.799 --> 00:06:09.799 All right? 00:06:09.799 --> 00:06:13.399 So choose the small datastore. 00:06:13.399 --> 00:06:15.700 Go to increase datastore capacity. 00:06:15.700 --> 00:06:18.000 Select the device that you want to expand. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:22.899 You can choose the space you want to expand it to and go ahead and increase it up. 00:06:22.899 --> 00:06:25.000 You can choose to use all the space that you added. 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:29.100 If you added 500 gigs, you could say you only want to use 200 of the five. 00:06:29.100 --> 00:06:29.700 Why would you do that? 00:06:29.700 --> 00:06:32.299 Probably not very likely, but you could. 00:06:32.299 --> 00:06:35.700 Or you can just say use all of it. 00:06:35.700 --> 00:06:43.000 So we covered creating VMFS datastores, connecting or mounting VMFS datastores, and extending VMS datastores. 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:46.700 Let's go ahead and go to our demo environment, and I'll show you how to do all of these things. 00:06:46.700 --> 00:06:49.600 So here is our vSphere environment. 00:06:49.600 --> 00:06:52.399 And from here, I can go to a host, right? 00:06:52.399 --> 00:06:56.600 I can go to datastores, and I can see the datastores that this host has access to right now. 00:06:56.600 --> 00:06:59.500 It only has access to its local storage, right? 00:06:59.500 --> 00:07:06.000 I can go to configure, and in here, I have my storage adapters. 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:08.299 I have storage devices, which it's scanning right now. 00:07:08.299 --> 00:07:12.200 I'll bring them up. 00:07:12.200 --> 00:07:14.299 All right, here's my storage devices. 00:07:14.299 --> 00:07:17.500 And I have my other, you know, options for my storage in here. 00:07:17.500 --> 00:07:22.799 I can go to my actual storage, right? 00:07:22.799 --> 00:07:26.899 And from here, I can see, you know, my basic overall datacenter storage. 00:07:26.899 --> 00:07:30.399 I can see datastores that are in this datacenter. 00:07:30.399 --> 00:07:37.200 Here, I can go to datastores, and I can see all the datastores that are on both my hosts that are currently in this cluster. 00:07:37.200 --> 00:07:45.700 I can go to actions, and I can go to storage, and I can say I want to create a new datastore. 00:07:45.700 --> 00:07:47.600 Now, what kind of datastore am I going to create? 00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:51.899 I'm going to create a VMFS datastore. 00:07:51.899 --> 00:07:59.600 I'm going to give this a name, and maybe I'll just call this prod. 00:07:59.600 --> 00:08:08.399 I should also call it demo prod VMs. 00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:11.399 Select the host that I want to create this datastore on first. 00:08:11.399 --> 00:08:14.600 Click obviously, what can it see, right? 00:08:14.600 --> 00:08:16.799 Now, here, this is my NAS. 00:08:16.799 --> 00:08:17.700 This is a local disk. 00:08:17.700 --> 00:08:20.600 I'm sorry, my SAN, and this is a local disk. 00:08:20.600 --> 00:08:26.100 So, I'm going to select the volume from my SAN. 00:08:26.100 --> 00:08:29.399 I'm going to say next. 00:08:29.399 --> 00:08:31.399 What version of VMFS do I want to use? 00:08:31.399 --> 00:08:37.200 All my hosts support version 6, so I'm going to choose version 6. 00:08:37.200 --> 00:08:40.900 Now, here, I can choose my partition configuration. 00:08:40.900 --> 00:08:43.700 I can say use all the available space, right? 00:08:43.700 --> 00:08:49.299 Or, actually, I want to shrink this down. 00:08:49.299 --> 00:08:55.700 I don't want to use all of it. 00:08:55.700 --> 00:09:03.400 I can specify my block size, my reclamation granularity, right, and my reclamation policy. 00:09:03.400 --> 00:09:08.900 Low means it's not going to be super aggressive, or I can say none, right, 00:09:08.900 --> 00:09:12.000 which means don't worry about reclaiming space. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:15.299 All right, now block size, normally you're going to choose your default block size. 00:09:15.299 --> 00:09:18.700 It's not going to really mess with that, okay, but you could make your block sizes, 00:09:18.700 --> 00:09:25.700 you know, bigger or smaller if you choose the VMFS version 5. 00:09:25.700 --> 00:09:33.599 Now, I'm going to say next, and I'm going to say finish. 00:09:33.599 --> 00:09:37.900 And when that task completes, that's all done. 00:09:37.900 --> 00:09:39.299 Let's just refresh this. 00:09:39.299 --> 00:09:47.700 Now, from here, I should be able to choose my datastore, go to actions, storage. 00:09:47.700 --> 00:09:48.700 I'm sorry, not from there. 00:09:48.700 --> 00:09:50.000 That's what I meant, I'm sorry. 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:56.400 On the datastore itself, I should go to here, and I can say I want to browse the datastore, right? 00:09:56.400 --> 00:10:00.000 I can also say I want to unmount this datastore from here. 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:04.500 So, I have some different storage options if I actually go directly to the datastore itself. 00:10:04.500 --> 00:10:13.000 Now, another thing I can do from here is I can say I want to increase the datastore's capacity. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:16.200 So, again, this is the datastore. 00:10:16.200 --> 00:10:17.799 And now it's showing me the empty space. 00:10:17.799 --> 00:10:23.000 I can choose to use all the empty space or I can say I want to use some of the empty space, right? 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:32.700 I'll go ahead and say use all the empty space and finish. 00:10:32.700 --> 00:10:38.400 And note the capacity here right now, and I just added that additional 100 gigs to it, right? 00:10:38.400 --> 00:10:44.900 So, when I look at the datastore, I don't know that it's two separate extents. 00:10:44.900 --> 00:10:49.099 Now, in this particular situation, I added storage from the same LUN. 00:10:49.099 --> 00:10:51.900 I don't have to only add storage from the same LUN. 00:10:51.900 --> 00:10:53.200 I could go in there and add storage. 00:10:53.200 --> 00:11:01.200 If I had other LUNs available to me, I could choose other LUNs also to add the storage from. 00:11:01.200 --> 00:11:03.299 So, it's not only has to be the same one. 00:11:03.299 --> 00:11:04.700 That's the example I used. 00:11:04.700 --> 00:11:12.599 But another reason why you would add an extent is because I want to add another LUN from the storage array or maybe from a different array. 00:11:12.599 --> 00:11:18.400 But I want to add another LUN because it used to be we had a maximum LUN size of two terabytes. 00:11:18.400 --> 00:11:27.400 So, if I needed to have a five-terabyte datastore, I would have to add at least three LUNs together, you know, two and two and one or something like that. 00:11:27.400 --> 00:11:32.099 So, in order to get to a datastore that was larger than my two-terabyte LUN maximum. 00:11:32.099 --> 00:11:36.299 So, we went in and we created a datastore and we extended a datastore.