Managing Storage for a Virtual Machine

This chapter helps us in understanding storage virtualization, configuring virtual machine (VM) storage options, and tuning VM storage. Similar to the processor and memory virtualization, storage virtualization is an abstraction of the physical resources presented to the virtual machines as if they actually controlled the physical devices. Just as with memory and CPUs, there are limited options for changing the storage of a VM. Disk mirroring is the use of a second disk to perfectly mirror the data blocks of a first disk. Disk striping is another common technique. Here, a single file system is striped in pieces across multiple disks, and when data is written or read back, the multiple drives can work in tandem, significantly decreasing the throughput time. Another strategy used for efficient storage usage is data deduplication. Deduplication is similar to the memory page sharing.