VMware Cloud Community
neilpotter
Contributor
Contributor

Advice on changing SAN setup after upgrade to ESXi 5.5

I have inherited an older VmWare system that I want to look at changing the setup.

We have a HP MSA 2040 SAN that has been setup as below

12 x 4Tb SAS drives setup into 2 x Disk Pools of 16Tb each, RAID 6.

Then 30 x Volumes / LUN’s, ranging from 10 x 232Gb LUN’s for OS VMDK’s, and the remainder being 1.36Tb LUN’s to be used for Data VMDK’s.  All totalling around 28Tb on the SAN but allocated equally into the two Disk pools.

These are all split into 4 x groups although if I’m honest I’m not sure why.

So all in all it looks like it’s been setup for the best performance if you had each VMDK assigned to it’s own LUN etc, but it’s different to the SAN that I have had setup at my own site which only has 4 x Larger LUN’s, with <2Tb VMDK’s.  In my mind that’s easier to manage, expand, add and snapshot the VM’s.

In theory, could I have a bit of a VMDK tidy up, and remove any unused datastores from vSphere, remove from the SAN, then expand the remaining LUN’s to give them extra space and easier management?

And is that literally "remove the datastore from vSphere / the hosts", re-allocate within the SAN, and then do a storage scan with vSphere again to see the additional storage after expansion?

We have recently upgraded to ESXi5.5 so no longer have the 2Tb VMDK limit either, so if we were to recreate the larger File Server volumes, should we aim for a single larger VMDK, or still use multiple <2Tb and Span within windows?

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Reply