Chapter 13. Virtual Disks and RDMs

VMware vSphere 5, and earlier releases, abstract the storage and presents it to virtual machines in various forms which are virtual disks, Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), and generic pass-through SCSI devices. This chapter deals with virtual disks and RDMs.

The Big Picture

To better understand how virtual disks and RDMs are abstracted, see Figure 13.1 for a high-level diagram.

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Figure 13.1. Virtual disks and RDMs

In Figure 13.1, 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 to the ...

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