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Joshwaa
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-19-2012 08:09 AM

Questions about VMFS

Hello I am a total new person to VMWare. I have set up ESXi5.1 trial on my server. All went well. I am now ready to ad my RAID card for VMFS. I purchased the LSI MegaRaid 9260-4i. My question is this. I am using this setup for learning. Probaly run some linux and windows Guest OS's just for fun and learning. I would like the VMFS to be large enough for any needs I might have and also fast. I like speed, less latency the better. So what is a good size and what drives to use(SATAIII SSD, SATAIII 10k WD Raptors, SATAIII WD 1TB Red Drives, SAS6 15K Cheetas). Please ask any questions you have as I know I probably didn't give all the necessary information for choosing my best path.  Thank you!

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vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal
‎10-19-2012 10:27 AM

Hello and welcome to the communities.

I almost always just use RAID5 with whatever disks happen to be available. Unless you are going to support a lot of IO in the guests, or a lot of VMs on the host, then it probably won't really be an issue which type disks and RAID you use for testing purposes.

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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Joshwaa
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-20-2012 06:05 AM

Thank you for the reply. I too will either run RAID5 or RAID10. What would you say is good for drives. Are the SATA's as fast as the SAS drives yet? If I want SSD's will they be trashed over time(VMFS trim support?)  I am kinda  a computer speed junky. I don't plan on running a lot of VM's at a time. I would however like to be able to spawn a new VM for a copy (Template maybe) as fast as possible. I plan on learning linux on a VM so I can trash the Guest Linux OS and not have to worry about it, just delete GuestOS and spawn a fresh installation. Thanks for the help!

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Joshwaa
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-22-2012 12:29 PM

After some talking on another forum it seems that my controler has Cache Cade 2.0 available. So I can use a SSD for cache and regular 7200rpm SATA3's for storage space. Seems like a problem solved. Does this work with VMFS? Anyone using this setup?

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