Rating – Must Have for any vSphere Professional

When I first started working with vSphere in my home lab a few years ago, I didn’t realize that how much of an impact storage could have on performance.  I just assumed that performance issues were either CPU or memory related.  Fast forward a few years, and I’ve learned how important a properly sized and configured storage can be to a vSphere’s environment performance, but I still found troubleshooting storage issues to be difficult.

That’s where Troubleshooting vSphere Storage comes in.  Although this books only weighs in at 150 pages, the five chapters and three appendices provide a lot of detailed information that will be useful when troubleshooting real-world storage issues.  The first two chapters serve as an introduction and recap of storage in a vSphere environment and the tools used to troubleshoot storage issues.  The final three chapters deal with troubleshooting storage issues, including troubleshooting issues where ESXi can’t see the storage, troubleshooting issues with storage contention, and troubleshooting issues with capacity.  The three appendices provide troubleshooting checklists, a primer on using ESXTOP for troubleshooting storage, and a list of ISCSI error codes that show up in the logs.

I realize that this review is somewhat short, but I don’t have a lot to say except that this book should be an essential part of any vSphere administrator’s toolkit.