Chapter 7. Managing Storage with PowerCLI

Your virtual machines need storage for their configuration files, disks, swap files, and snapshot files. These files can be placed on datastores that reside on a host's local storage, Network File System (NFS), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Fibre Channel (FC) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Storage Area Networks (SANs). Datastores can be grouped into Datastore Clusters to create pools of datastores for storage aggregation, easy initial placement of disks, and load balancing using Storage DRS. In this chapter, we will discuss how to manage storage with PowerCLI.

The topics that will be covered in this chapter are as follows:

• Rescanning for new storage devices

• Creating datastores

• Retrieving datastores

• Setting the multipathing policy

• Configuring the vmhba paths to a SCSI device

• Working with Raw Device Mappings

• Configuring Storage I/O Control

• Configuring Storage DRS

• Upgrading datastores to VMFS-5

• Removing datastores