vSphere datastore

In the Ultra Transcenders books

VBR-13VONE-13

Each book explains vSphere datastore in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• WHERE

  Limits a SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE to just the rows meeting a condition. Omit it, and the statement hits every row.

• vSphere

  VMware's platform for virtualisation, made up of vCenter and ESX hosts, supplying compute for VCF clusters.

• VMFS

  Clustered file system for block datastores, whether the storage is iSCSI, local or FC-attached. Unlike VMFS5, VMFS6 can use 4Kn devices and reclaims freed space by itself.

• NFS

  Network File System, a file-sharing protocol from the Unix world, available on Azure Files, Azure NetApp Files and Blob Storage (as NFSv3).

• vSAN

  VMware's software-defined storage, which combines local devices across a cluster's ESX hosts into one shared datastore. Available as OSA or ESA, VCF can use it as principal storage.

• vSphere Virtual Volumes

  Deprecated in vSphere 9.0, this framework has the array, through VASA, hold every virtual machine disk as an individual volume, grouped into storage containers.

• RESTORE

  Puts a Delta table back to how it was at an older point, picked by TO VERSION AS OF or TO TIMESTAMP AS OF. You need MODIFY, and once VACUUM has cleared the old files it can't succeed.

• failback

  Moving workloads home from replicas, either onto the original VMs (updated to match the replicas' latest state) or onto VMs somewhere new. Being provisional, it ends with a commit or a roll-back to FAILOVER.