ESXi disk setup

[DaveBloor]

I have a small HP ML110 G5.

In the box I have a USB key and 4 500Gb SATA HDD's

I want to install two Server 2008 R2 servers, one running as a DC/DNS/DHCP and the other doing basic File and Print.

What is the best way to utilise the disk?

[guyrleech]

Wrong community but hopefully a moderator will spot the post and move it for you.

AFAIK on an ML110 you cannot use the onboard RAID so you either have to have each disk separate, and thus have four separate datastores which you could create a disk on each and have C: and 😧 drives on both servers, particularly if you boot off USB so you don't need to install to the hard drives, or you would look at buying a compatible RAID card, have a single RAID 5 datastore, or maybe two mirrored pairs, one for each VM. Mirrored keeps the drives separate for potentially better performance but the RAID 5 allows better use of the storage.

I have an ML110 G6 for a specific project which runs two VMs with 4x2TB SATA drives configured as a pair of mirrored drives via an Intel RS2WC080 RAID card. Boots off USB and therefore has two 2TB datastores with one VM's disk per datastore. This works nicely and is very fast, particularly given the low cost.

[a_p_]

Discussion moved from VMware Server 1 to VMware ESXi™ 4

André

[bulletprooffool]

I'd install the ESXi installation to the USB key then provision the remaining disks as a Datastore.

As you only have 4 Disks, you can RAID 5 these, have Redundancy and still have 1.5TB of usable space.

VMware will support up to 2TB (minus a little) - so you should be good to go.

Just make sure to use an 8MB block size on the Datastore that you create.