VMware Cloud Community
LismoreAdmin
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 05:12 PM

Disk Configurations for ESXi

I realise this question has been discussed many a time.....

On small sites without the use of a SAN, we configure our VM Hosts generally in the format:

- 2x RAID 1 SAS disks for the ESXi install.

- Then RAID 5 remaining SAS disks for virtual machines.

I have recently been seeing a lot of negativity against RAID 5 for the READ/WRITE speed ( Not that we have noticed any performance issues or bottle necks). Should RAID 10 be the preffered choice for the virtual machine storage? Should all functions be performed on one large RAID 10 set, even the ESXi install?

I look forward to your comments

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎10-05-2010 05:22 PM

Welcome to the VMware Communities forums. If you don't need the storage space of RAID 5, I would go with RAID 10. Note that ESX(i) has a 2 TB LUN limit so you may have to carve up your total storage into smaller LUNs.

When ESXi boots it creates a RAM disk and accesses the install disk very little. I wouldn't bother dedicated any drives just to it. If you don't want to mix the ESXi system partitions with your datastore drives you can boot ESXi from an embedded flash device (assuming you can add one to the host).




Dave

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