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kyiin
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Setting up virtual servers to work with a SAN and vMotion

Hello all:

I apologize in advance if this discussion is too much like another.

I plan to use the following setup (not deployed yet) and would appreciate any comments and input:

     2 physical host servers running VMware ESXi

     1 Fibre Channel SAN

     vMotion and High-Availability

I just have a few questions:

     1) Can I keep all VHD files on the SAN?  (I plan to have separate VHD files for OS drive and DATA drive for each VM.)

     2) Is it recommended that I have any local hard drives on the physical hosts (for running the VMs or anything else like paging files)?

     3) How much space should I have on the SAN?  I assume enough for the OS drives and DATA drives of all the VMs ... is any additional space recommended for anything?

     4) Would anybody be able to point me to any guides detailing how to set this up?

Sincerely,

Kahn

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rcporto
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     1) Can I keep all VHD files on the SAN?  (I plan to have separate VHD files for OS drive and DATA drive for each VM.)

Yes you can, and just a tip, on VMware world the virtual disk is called VMDK 🙂

     2) Is it recommended that I have any local hard drives on the physical hosts (for running the VMs or anything else like paging files)?

You can use even physical hosts without the hard drive, since you can boot from SAN or use features like Auto Deploy, but this is about the installation... for the virtual machine my recommendation is use disks (volumes) from your SAN and share this volumes between your hosts to be possible configure (HA) High Availability. Without shared storage you can't get HA.

     3) How much space should I have on the SAN?  I assume enough for the OS drives and DATA drives of all the VMs ... is any additional space recommended for anything?

The space on SAN will depend of the size of your VMs and some additional space to make room for swap and snapshot files.

     4) Would anybody be able to point me to any guides detailing how to set this up?

The documentation will have all you need: vSphere 6.0 Documentation Center but if you want some guide with step by step and with video/screen, see that one: BackToBasics | Mike Laverick...

---

Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto

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rcporto
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     1) Can I keep all VHD files on the SAN?  (I plan to have separate VHD files for OS drive and DATA drive for each VM.)

Yes you can, and just a tip, on VMware world the virtual disk is called VMDK 🙂

     2) Is it recommended that I have any local hard drives on the physical hosts (for running the VMs or anything else like paging files)?

You can use even physical hosts without the hard drive, since you can boot from SAN or use features like Auto Deploy, but this is about the installation... for the virtual machine my recommendation is use disks (volumes) from your SAN and share this volumes between your hosts to be possible configure (HA) High Availability. Without shared storage you can't get HA.

     3) How much space should I have on the SAN?  I assume enough for the OS drives and DATA drives of all the VMs ... is any additional space recommended for anything?

The space on SAN will depend of the size of your VMs and some additional space to make room for swap and snapshot files.

     4) Would anybody be able to point me to any guides detailing how to set this up?

The documentation will have all you need: vSphere 6.0 Documentation Center but if you want some guide with step by step and with video/screen, see that one: BackToBasics | Mike Laverick...

---

Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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kyiin
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Hello Richardson:

Thank you very, very much for your responses!

I really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Kahn

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