I have a question about the best performance with drives and datastores

[johnzapf]

I am currently building up a new/used server to transfuse my servers(VM's) off of Hyper-V to ESXi. I am going to go with all SSD drives so its getting pricy. I know all about the different RAID config for best performance so that's not an issues. My question is how to get the best drive performance with ESXi and the VM's, IE: 1. everything on one volume, all drives raided as one (ESXi, and vm's all on the same raided drives) . Or 2. install ESXi on its own 128GB SSD, and then each VM on its own SSD, do you understand what I am trying to ask and find out? I am just getting ready to order drives so this Info is very important.

Thanks, John 

[ashilkrishnan · Accepted solution]

Hi @johnzapf ,

ESXi would not require much of a storage space, so installing on a flash SD card or storage created out of smaller, should be good enough.  It would be suggested to have them VM workload separated. In case there is a need to re-install ESXi host due to some issues/corruption, you can do so without loosing the VM configuration data located on 2nd set of storage.

Hope that helps.

[johnzapf]

Thanks, And also doesn't separating the VM's to individual Drives help with performance?

[ashilkrishnan]

Yes, VMs running on dedicated set of disks will have better performance

[johnzapf]

Thank you