Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world.
Now let's look at VMFS datastores.
So, to create a new datastore, you're going to select the host that you want to create the datastore on, right?
You go to storage, you're going to say new datastore, select the VMFS file system.
You're going to give it a name.
You're going to give a location where you want this to be available to,
and then select which devices it will be used.
Like if you're going to be a certain partition, how much of the partition.
You can set some information about like the size of it and, you know,
what file system version you want to use, some things like that.
In a moment, we'll do a demo.
We'll walk through actually creating the file system, and you'll see how it's done.
You can go to the host and do it.
You can also go to your actual datastore's area in vSphere, and you can create a datastore from there as well.
So, create the datastore.
One of the things you're going to decide is what version of VMFS do you want to use.
Do you want to use version 6 or version 5?
You want to make sure whatever version you pick is compatible with all your hosts.
If you're running older hosts, it'd have to be a much older host.
They may not support version 6.
But normally, you do want to use the most current version that you can in your environment.
So, most of the time, you probably want to use version 6.
Version 5 allowed you to use LUNs that were greater than 2 terabytes.
Version 6 also allows for automatic space reclamation.
And what space reclamation means is, basically, let's say we have a VMFS file, right?
I'm sorry, sorry, a VMDK file.
And your VMDK file is this virtual disk for a VM, and it has grown and grown and grown and grown.
And then you're like, this is really old data.
I don't need this data on my storage anymore.
And you go in and you delete, you know, 800 gigs of data, or maybe you archive it, you know,
hopefully archived it someplace else and just delete it.
And you removed it from this virtual machine.
Then you go to your SAN and say, I just deleted 800 gigs.
I should have 800 gigs, and you don't have 800 gigs.
Why?
Because all that data is still actually there, and it doesn't shrink that file, right?
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.
And then your SAN with VMFS version 6 can go in and reclaim all those zeroed out blocks and shrink that VMDK file.
So, you can go in there and you can reclaim space that's been freed up.
Now, if you just delete a VMDK file, the SAN sees that VMDK file is gone and it's going to reclaim it.
But it's not going to actually shrink it because data within the file was deleted, right?
And that's what we're talking about is what's happening inside of these VMDK files.
And that's always been the challenge with virtualization is what's happening inside this virtual container?
What's happening with the CPU and the memory and the RAM?
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.
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.
What else is happening?
And, you know, did the space that's being used and how old is this space?
And what can be, you know, reclaimed and a bunch of things like that.
There's a lot of tools for helping you manage that.
Things that used to be kind of hidden by the hypervisor level are now much, much easier to see.
Because of the enhancements in vSphere, because of third-party tools that are more enhanced,
because also vendors like Microsoft are making their operating systems much more virtualization-friendly
because they know most of the time they are virtualized.
Their servers, not their desktops, obviously.
Some of their desktops, you know, if you're doing virtual desktops.
But their servers a lot of times are virtualized.
And so they want to be more friendly to that environment.
Okay?
So choose what version of VMFS you're going to use, the size, the block size you're going to use,
any reclamation parameters you're going to configure, and how will it partition the datastore.
Hopefully, we're just going to use like all the free space that's on there.
But you can choose to use a portion or you can also, we'll talk about this in a moment,
add to an already existing datastore with an extent.
To mount a datastore that already exists, you can right-click on the datastore and you can say to select
mount the datastore and then choose the host that you want to mount to.
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,
and scan, and scan, and they should see it and bring it back up again.
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.
And it'll just trigger them all to scan and find that datastore.
To extend a datastore, this is what we were talking about before.
Let's say we have a LUN.
Now, normally when you create a datastore, you're probably going to use all the space that's on that LUN for that datastore.
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.
So why would you leave free space?
But what could happen is you did use up all the space.
You used up all 500 gigs of space on that LUN.
And then the LUN starts running low on space.
So now you need a bigger datastore.
What you can do is go into the SAN.
You can increase the size of the LUN.
And when you go into your ESXi host, it will show you a 1 terabyte LUN with a 500 gig datastore.
Now you can add that additional 500 gigs with an extend.
So an extend is going to basically allow more space on that datastore.
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.
It's going to fill up the first one.
When that first one's full, it goes to the next one and fills up the next one.
Okay?
So it doesn't improve performance or anything like that.
It allows you to grow a VMFS datastore.
All right?
So choose the small datastore.
Go to increase datastore capacity.
Select the device that you want to expand.
You can choose the space you want to expand it to and go ahead and increase it up.
You can choose to use all the space that you added.
If you added 500 gigs, you could say you only want to use 200 of the five.
Why would you do that?
Probably not very likely, but you could.
Or you can just say use all of it.
So we covered creating VMFS datastores, connecting or mounting VMFS datastores, and extending VMS datastores.
Let's go ahead and go to our demo environment, and I'll show you how to do all of these things.
So here is our vSphere environment.
And from here, I can go to a host, right?
I can go to datastores, and I can see the datastores that this host has access to right now.
It only has access to its local storage, right?
I can go to configure, and in here, I have my storage adapters.
I have storage devices, which it's scanning right now.
I'll bring them up.
All right, here's my storage devices.
And I have my other, you know, options for my storage in here.
I can go to my actual storage, right?
And from here, I can see, you know, my basic overall datacenter storage.
I can see datastores that are in this datacenter.
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.
I can go to actions, and I can go to storage, and I can say I want to create a new datastore.
Now, what kind of datastore am I going to create?
I'm going to create a VMFS datastore.
I'm going to give this a name, and maybe I'll just call this prod.
I should also call it demo prod VMs.
Select the host that I want to create this datastore on first.
Click obviously, what can it see, right?
Now, here, this is my NAS.
This is a local disk.
I'm sorry, my SAN, and this is a local disk.
So, I'm going to select the volume from my SAN.
I'm going to say next.
What version of VMFS do I want to use?
All my hosts support version 6, so I'm going to choose version 6.
Now, here, I can choose my partition configuration.
I can say use all the available space, right?
Or, actually, I want to shrink this down.
I don't want to use all of it.
I can specify my block size, my reclamation granularity, right, and my reclamation policy.
Low means it's not going to be super aggressive, or I can say none, right,
which means don't worry about reclaiming space.
All right, now block size, normally you're going to choose your default block size.
It's not going to really mess with that, okay, but you could make your block sizes,
you know, bigger or smaller if you choose the VMFS version 5.
Now, I'm going to say next, and I'm going to say finish.
And when that task completes, that's all done.
Let's just refresh this.
Now, from here, I should be able to choose my datastore, go to actions, storage.
I'm sorry, not from there.
That's what I meant, I'm sorry.
On the datastore itself, I should go to here, and I can say I want to browse the datastore, right?
I can also say I want to unmount this datastore from here.
So, I have some different storage options if I actually go directly to the datastore itself.
Now, another thing I can do from here is I can say I want to increase the datastore's capacity.
So, again, this is the datastore.
And now it's showing me the empty space.
I can choose to use all the empty space or I can say I want to use some of the empty space, right?
I'll go ahead and say use all the empty space and finish.
And note the capacity here right now, and I just added that additional 100 gigs to it, right?
So, when I look at the datastore, I don't know that it's two separate extents.
Now, in this particular situation, I added storage from the same LUN.
I don't have to only add storage from the same LUN.
I could go in there and add storage.
If I had other LUNs available to me, I could choose other LUNs also to add the storage from.
So, it's not only has to be the same one.
That's the example I used.
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.
But I want to add another LUN because it used to be we had a maximum LUN size of two terabytes.
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.
So, in order to get to a datastore that was larger than my two-terabyte LUN maximum.
So, we went in and we created a datastore and we extended a datastore.