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jahanzaib
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Data Store Clustering with Local Disk

Is this best practice to do Data Store Disk Clustering on locally attached Disk Drive or only on remote Storage LUNs such as SAN?

Further for example if we have UCS-Blades with locally attached disk on its blade and we plan for Data Store Clustering.

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rcporto
Leadership
Leadership

Assuming you're talking about Datastore Cluster, the best practice is to have all volumes on a shared storage, this way the vSphere Storage DRS will be able to balance virtual machines between datastores automatically. If you use local disks, the virtual machine files availability will be affected in case of a host failure.

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

For now I have only local disks availability which are mounted with 4 running blades. So can we do the clustering on these data store?

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rcporto
Leadership
Leadership

If you plan to have High Availability is not a good idea to use local disks, since that disks are not shared between hosts, and if a single host fails, all virtual machines stored on local disk of that particular host will become unavailable.

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

Then what is the advantage for creating data store Cluster to only see the combine space :smileyconfused:? I checked at my home lab by creating cluster for 3 locally mounted DataStore on 3 Esxi host it showing the combine space only. :smileysilly::smileysilly:

Disk Cluster for 3 Esxi Host (Esxi-5, Exsi6,Esxi7)

Disk Space combine.JPG

Esxi-5:

Disk Space combine Esxi-5.JPG

Esxi-6:

Disk Space combine Esxi-6.JPG

Esxi7:Disk Space combine Esxi-7.JPG

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rcporto
Leadership
Leadership

The advantage of a datastore cluster is to manage and manage them as a single entity and of course provide load balancing based on space and/or I/O latency and create anti-affinity rules. You can read more about benefits here: An introduction to Storage DRS

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