Datastores => Planning, planning and once more: Planning.

[irridium77]

hello,

I'm experimenting with vSphere and ESXi 5.5

I would like something running at all times.. I was thinking to convert my Physical CentOS 6.5 server running Plex to a Virtual Machine.

I still have my doubts about how i'm going to plan out the switch.

Let me start off by giving some machine specs.

HP Proliant ML-350 Gen5

32Gb RAM

HP SmartArray p200i raidcontroller.  **

3x 2Tb SATA drives (currently in RAID5)

Dual CPU Intel XEON 5450

** about the raidcontroller: (might give compabillity issue's with Esxi, and it does not support logical volumes larger then 6Tb,

       so i might swap it out for a p400 model so my storage can keep growing in an organic fashion)

That beeing said:

I have backed up all data that is important to me (about 2,5 Tb of Movies and Pictures)

(got that on a EXT4 formatted Drive)

As stated before: The host is for experimenting mostly..

Performance is only "important" for the CentOS VM (streaming via Plex and needs to be always powered on)

I was thinking to set Esxi 5.5 up like this:

- Esxi OS boot from USB drive (since it has low I/O)

Make 2 datastores =>

- One with 4Tb (to host CentOS , PlexMediaServer + house all my Movies & Pictures)

- One with 2Tb (to host experiments such as win server 2012 R2, a win7 swarmagent to help me out with some light rendering and a variety of linux distro's i'd like to play with)

Yey or Ney?

Questions that are not 100% clear for me.

- Datastores.. if i have 1 logical volume (6Tb) created via RAID => can i split it up into different datastores?

  Or is it one logical volume equals 1 datastore?  I have a very hard time understanding this subject.

- Why do we store images for VM's and the esxi OS on different places? I Mean: One 10Tb Datastore and all of your shit on there? What will the issues be?

- What backupsolutions are good? I'm looking into Veaam.

Thanks for taking some time. I will too, so this migration turns out picture perfect.

I will read and learn from all comments and not be blind of stubborn.

Kind regards,

Thomas

[pkolom]

Hi.

First thing, number of disks in your server is not huge, so don't expect any miracles... It won't make a big difference from performance point of view if you'll have two datastores or 1, two logical disks or one. Spindles are important and you have only three...

To answer your questions:

- best practice is to have 1 VMFS on 1 LUN. It is possible to to create many datastores on one LUN/logical disk, but it's rather advanced topic... so I wouldn't reccomed it.

- we store ESXi OS and VMs on different places, it's the architecture and nothing we can do about it. And yes, you can have one 10TB datastore for VMs,issue here is that all VMs sitting there will share datastore's performance.

- About backup: Veeam is great, but if you don't need all the bells and whistles, you should check out Nakivo.