I'm reading page 56 of the the vSphere ESXi vCenter Server 5.1 Upgrade Guide
It discusses the issue of DNS load balancing and vCenter Server Datastore Naming.
I believe it is discussing the issue of shared storage and multiple VMware hosts accessing a same-datastore, and that each host should name it the same, due to how 5.1 no longer resolves DNS names to IP, but now uses the DNS name for the datastore.
I do not have shared storage. All of my datastore (3 now on 3 hosts) are local. I am assuming I in no way need to name all of my local data stores the same. Correct?
Here is the direct text from page 56:
DNS Load Balancing Solutions and vCenter Server Datastore Naming
vCenter Server 5.x uses different internal identifiers for datastores than earlier versions of vCenter Server. This
change affects the way that you add shared NFS datastores to hosts and can affect upgrades to vCenter Server
5.x.
vCenter Server versions before version 5.0 convert datastore host names to IP addresses. For example, if you
mount an NFS datastore by the name \\nfs-datastore\folder, pre-5.0 vCenter Server versions convert the name
nfs-datastore to an IP address like 10.23.121.25 before storing it. The original nfs-datastore name is lost.
This conversion of host names to IP addresses causes a problem when DNS load balancing solutions are used
with vCenter Server. DNS load balancing solutions themselves replicate data and appear as a single logical
datastore. The load balancing happens during the datastore host name-to-IP conversion by resolving the
datastore host name to different IP addresses, depending on the load. This load balancing happens outside
vCenter Server and is implemented by the DNS server. In vCenter Server versions before version 5.0, features
like vMotion do not work with such DNS load balancing solutions because the load balancing causes one
logical datastore to appear as several datastores. vCenter Server fails to perform vMotion because it cannot
recognize that what it sees as multiple datastores are actually a single logical datastore that is shared between
two hosts.
To solve this problem, vCenter Server versions 5.0 and later do not convert datastore names to IP addresses
when you add datastores. This enables vCenter Server to recognize a shared datastore, but only if you add the
datastore to each host by the same datastore name. For example, vCenter Server does not recognize a datastore
as shared between hosts in the following cases.
--The datastore is added by IP address to host1 and by hostname to host2.
--The datastore is added by hostname to host1, and by hostname.vmware.com to host2.
For vCenter Server to recognize a datastore as shared, you must add the datastore by the same name to every
host.
