Reddit mentions of Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0 (VMware Press)

For the overall picture (vSphere only), you can't go wrong with Scott Lowe's Mastering vSphere 5.

Epping and Denneman wrote a technical deepdive book on clustering which really gets into the nitty gritty.

And for storage, Mostafa Khalil wrote the bible.

Also, if you want to really dive into the virtualization arena, definitely check out the VMware community site. Follow people on twitter, join the live podcasts (community podcast and vBrownBags), etc... Listening to recorded podcasts is also a great way to learn.

As another poster said, you don't necessarily need a SAN, these days you would be best off starting with storage connected over your network (VLANed and QoSed), you could start with a NAS device and use NFS datastores.


If you wanted to go for a SAN you can get an iSCSI SAN as also already mentioned Dell EqualLogic is a good option

A couple of books to read :

Scott Lowe et al. Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/1118661141

Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0

http://www.amazon.com/Storage-Implementation-vSphere-VMware-Press/dp/0321799933/

The latter book is a good in depth look at storage from VMware press.

The main thing to be aware of for storage is IOPs and latency, these are the biggest performance killers as you scale. So design around desired IOPs (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

It's getting worse, I hear that some of the most senior support people, like the guy that wrote the book on vmware storage was laid off as well.

If you are looking into anything regarding these technologies and VMWare, this book is great: Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0. I didn't have any exposure before my recent VMWare training. I didn't even know what a LUN was. After the book, I feel much better about being able to not only work with several storage technologies but also knowing what they are doing and why.

edit: Also, definitely look into whatever you can to track and compare metrics across the various technologies. It helps to understand the strength/weaknesses of each type of solution, where they should be used in your business and scalability/bottlenecks/SPF.