Chapter 13. Virtual Disks and RDMs

VMware vSphere 6 and earlier releases abstract storage and present it to virtual machines in various forms, including virtual disks, raw device mappings (RDMs), and generic passthrough SCSI devices. This chapter deals with virtual disks and RDMs.

The Big Picture

To help you better understand how virtual disks and RDMs are abstracted, Figure 13.1 provides a high-level diagram.

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Figure 13.1 Virtual disks and RDMs

In Figure 13.1, the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore was created on LUN1 on the storage area network (SAN). A virtual disk is a file on the VMFS datastore. When the virtual disk is attached ...

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