6.0.1

Working with Datastores 16
Datastores are logical containers, analogous to le systems, that hide specics of physical storage and
provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine les. Datastores can also be used for storing ISO
images, virtual machine templates, and oppy images.
Depending on the storage you use, datastores can be of the following types:
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VMFS datastores that are backed by the Virtual Machine File System format. See “Understanding VMFS
Datastores,” on page 146.
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NFS datastores that are backed by the Network File System NFS format. See “Understanding Network
File System Datastores,” on page 152.
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Virtual SAN datastores. See the Administering VMware Virtual SAN documentation.
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Virtual Volumes datastores. See Chapter 19, “Working with Virtual Volumes,” on page 213.
After creating datastores, you can perform several administrative operations on the datastores. Certain
operations, such as renaming a datastore, are available for all types of datastores. While others apply to
specic types of datastores.
You can also organize datastores in dierent ways. For example, you can group them into folders according
to business practices. This allows you to assign the same permissions and alarms on the datastores in the
group at one time.
You can also add datastores to datastore clusters. A datastore cluster is a collection of datastores with shared
resources and a shared management interface. When you create a datastore cluster, you can use Storage DRS
to manage storage resources. For information about datastore clusters, see the vSphere Resource Management
documentation.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Understanding VMFS Datastores,” on page 146
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“Understanding Network File System Datastores,” on page 152
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“Creating Datastores,” on page 160
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“Managing Duplicate VMFS Datastores,” on page 162
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“Upgrading VMFS Datastores,” on page 164
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“Increasing VMFS Datastore Capacity,” on page 165
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“Administrative Operations for Datastores,” on page 167
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“Set Up Dynamic Disk Mirroring,” on page 174
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“Collecting Diagnostic Information for ESXi Hosts on a Storage Device,” on page 175
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“Checking Metadata Consistency with VOMA,” on page 178
VMware, Inc.
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