From the course: VMware vSphere: Advanced Storage Configuration and Administration

Managing storage filters

From the course: VMware vSphere: Advanced Storage Configuration and Administration

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Managing storage filters

- [Narrator] In this video I'll demonstrate how to configure storage filters in your vCenter server. These are in advanced setting on the vCenter server, and one that should definitely not be casually changed. As a matter of fact, anytime you're modifying an advanced setting you may want to consult VMware support first. Especially if you're making the change on your production environment. It's critical that you understand the implications of the changes I'm about to show you, and the potential problems that they can cause. So let's start by clicking on our vCenter inventory list. We'll choose vCenter Servers, and I'm going to choose our vCenter instance. Click on Manage, and under settings I'm going to click on Advanced Settings. Advanced settings are something that you want to proceed with caution as you modify them. Again, it's always a good idea to consult with VMware support before making these changes. I'll click on Edit under Advanced Settings. There are a few storage filters that I'm going to show you. The first filter that I'm going to show you is called config.vpxd.filter.hostrescanfilter. I'm going to modify the value of this to False. This is a filter that you may potentially want to modify. If you're going to be creating a large number of data stores and you don't want multiple re-scans to occur. Maybe you just want to manually initiate a re-scan after you create your final volume. You can modify this setting to accomplish that goal. So I'll click on Add, to add this advanced setting. Another setting that we can modify is the config.vpxd.filter.vmfsfilter. I can change this value to False as well. The impact of this advanced setting could potentially cause us some problems. What we're doing by setting this to False is we're allowing LUNs to be exposed that already have VMFS volume's written to them. We can create a new VMFS volume on top of those LUNs. So this could definitely create some issues as we may accidentally overwrite data or corrupt data. So in this situation, unless I have a specific need that truly requires me to change this advanced setting, I'm going to leave it configured as True. Now another very similar setting is config.vpxd.filter.rdmfilter. This is very similar to the VMFS filter that I just showed you. By default, vCenter will filter out and not expose LUNs that already have raw device mappings created on them. This prevents you, again, from accidentally overwriting data, or from potentially corrupting data. Now if you have a LUN that contains a raw device mapping that you need to expose to multiple virtual machines, for clustering purposes you may want to come in and change this value to False. Unless you have an application that specifically requires that, again, by default the best practice is to leave this value at True. The final advanced setting that I'm going to show you for storage filters is the config.vpxd.filter.samehostandtransportsfilter. Again, by default the best practice is to leave this value as True. What this allows you to do is add incompatible LUNs as an extent to an existing data store. So maybe you have a LUN that's not presented to all of your ESXi hosts, and you have a data store that is presented to all of your ESXi hosts. If you change this value to False, it will give you the capability to add that incompatible LUN to an existing data store. So again this opens up the possibility for some real problems, and should not be changed to False unless you have a very good reason to do so.

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