Storage and RBAC Notes - echadbourne/SYS-350 GitHub Wiki

VM Storage

  • Virtual Disks (vmdks) are stored on DataStores
  • These are exposed to the Virtual Machines as SCSI drives
  • The GuestOS interacts with these disks user SCSI regardless of the form factor of the physical disks (abstracted)
  • Two major types of Datastores include
    • VMS
    • NAS
  • Our disks are currently local to the hypervisor hosts

VMFS

Proprietary to VMWare

Build to effectively and efficiently store and access virtual machines and snapshots

How Storage is typically configured

Multiple physical disks on an esxi host

RAID is usually configured via the RAID Controller as opposed to within the host operating system (esxi)

RAID 1+0

  • RAID 1+0 mirrors two drives together and then creates a striped set with the pai

SSD

Hybrid Storage

  • Use SSD for Cache and then offload to spinning disk
  • Full on SSD/NVMe

NAS

  • Network Attached Storage (Not SAN)
  • File Level Storage, Include NFS and SMB/CIFS)

SAN Technologies

  • Fibre Channel
  • ISCSI
  • ATA over Ethernet (AoE)
  • Hyper SCSI
  • vSan is VMWare Propriety and actually uses host based storage logically bundled together as a SAN. Particularly expensive but there are some compelling benefits in hyper converged environment

NAS Looks like a file server

SAN Looks like a Disk

Thin vs Thick

Thin

You have allocated 30GB to Windows 10

  • Only the space required is actually lovated
  • The allocation will grow up to 30GB
  • Method we use on cyber.local to save disk space

Thick

You have allocated 30GB to Windows 10

  • All 30GB is marked and allocated
  • Eager and Lazy zeroing of data

RBAC

Defines roles and privileges on vCenter resources

Apply roles on specific resources for local users or added identity provider users

We're doing this to allow our vcenter environments to support various types of additional users with different resources in the environment

Roles assign privileges, users/groups assigned to roles