Well, that one objective dealt with. Just another 30 odd to go. Don’t forget that reading is not everything, you need to have done as much of this stuff as possible. There are links to VMware’s product documentation throughout, be sure to be familiar with it as the

To put an application into a virtual environment you must first understand its I/O requirements to make sure that it will perform adequately on the storage that you have configured. This is very much like the process of determining how much CPU and Memory resource an application will need

What is LUN masking? [http://www.sansecurity.com/faq/lun-masking.shtml] explains what LUN masking is in layman’s terms (in case you have a NAS only background). See Storage Masking? [http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/02/05/storage-masking/] for the Yellow Bricks advice on LUN masking. For an overview

VMFS Resignaturing [http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/08/a-few-technic-1.html] is worth a read. See also the section on Managing Duplicate VMFS Datastores in the ESX Configuration Guide [http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_server_config.pdf].

From the ESX Configuration Guide [http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_server_config.pdf]. When you perform VMFS datastore management operations, vCenter Server uses default storage filters. The filters help you to avoid storage corruption by retrieving only the storage devices, or LUNs, that can be

Read Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN [http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/performance_char_vmfs_rdm.pdf]. It may be for ESX 3.5 but still holds true. The conclusion from the document is: VMware ESX Server offers two options for disk access management—VMFS and

Obviously the choice of storage vendor and the underlying technologies play a part here but there are some general guidelines that apply regardless. VMware themselves have a short page [http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtual-storage/best-practices.html] on this which I have copied below: Many of the best practices for

There isn’t a single rule for this – there are more like thousands of rules! Basically have an idea of what workloads VMs are generating in terms of IO and try to balance them out but also bear in mind that write intensive loads will perform better on RAID 10

From How NPIV-Based LUN Access Works [http://pubs.vmware.com/vi35/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=fibre_san_config&file=esx_san_cfg_manage.8.17.html] : > SAN objects, such as switches, HBAs, storage devices, or virtual machines can be assigned World Wide Name (WWN) identifiers.

DirectPath places some limitations on VMs and so is used with caution. Generally, any VM that uses DirectPath becomes tied to an ESX host – vMotion and DRS will not work. DirectPath must first be enabled in the ESX host's BIOS. As a consequence only certain systems support this.

RAID Levels Surprise, wikipedia has a decent overview of different RAID levels [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels]. As such there is no point reproducing it here! In practice, levels 0, 1, 5 and 6 are most commonly used in commercial storage systems. Know these off by heart.