Datacore SANMelody and ESX 3.5 Update 2 LUN carving scheme's

[djoman30]

Ok all the SAN junkies out there...riddle me this. Is it better to do the 1 VM per iSCSI LUN or create a big LUN, up to 2TB, format it with VMFS3, and run multiple VM's on it. I guess VMWare has changed their toon on this, so I would like to get practical feild advice on this. Pretty much all my clients can't afford the big SAN vendors so we have chosen to go with Datacore's SANMelody to at least get them on iSCSI and to be able to use the enterprise features of VMWare. Most of them can afford up to 2TB of storage in a typical server chassis. Also as a follow up question, I have SANMelody running now with two ESX hosts using iSCSI. It is working great. I have IOMeter on one of the VM's sitting on the SAN and want to run some good tests. So my question is, what are considered bad, good, great numbers when it comes to disk IO. So far this machine is running pretty fast although its the only machine on my test lab right now. Id like to get some real numbers for Exchange 2007 if anyone has any.

Thanks in advance.

D

[epping]

hi use jetstress for exchange u will get more meaningfull measures

[Berniebgf]

Djoman30.......

If you want to do your own testing, use the IOmeter template at the following location to compare against VMTN "Unofficial Performance thread" posts...(link below)

http://www.mez.co.uk/OpenPerformanceTest.icf

Have a look at the following link, it has all of the results from the VMTN "Unofficial Performance thread" graphed.

http://sanmelody.blogspot.com/2008/06/vmtn-sanmelody-performance-chart.html

Here is a link to the original Thread.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745

If you want to Also, I have done some other benchmarking off SANMelody with VMware + IOMeter, see following for details.

http://sanmelody.blogspot.com

Hope it helps.

Bernie

http://sanmelody.blogspot.com

[DenisJones]

Some day I also used openfiler. But because of lot of problems with it I had to migrate to another software. After all I choosed Starwind iSCSI, using it lready for year, and it works fine.

Denis.