LUN sizing with XIV

[nimos001]

I am curious to see what size LUNS people are using and why. I am about to replace several clusters and am going to be creating new LUNS and formating new with VMFS5. In the past I have went with 1TB to 2TB sizes, but now am looking to increase. I thought it would be helpfull to see how the rest of you are going about this?

[mrpink37]

I have tested this recently. I created a virtual block device with zfs and set the size to 27 TB. Then I set up an iSCSI target with Solaris 11 and mounted the LUN from within ESXi5. I copied a few VMs on the block device and did some benchmarking to examine performance differences between block level and nfs-hosted vms.

So far my testing shows little difference in the performance of 4k reads/writes but I will have to examine in some more detail.

However, there were no issues with ESXi as to the size of the iSCSI LUN.

[nimos001]

I ended up settling on 4TB LUNS for my environment, while I could easily go much larger without any performance issues, I find that for the time being this is a comfortable size for our environment.