SAN Best Practices for VSphere

[aronillo]

Hi everyone!

I'm new on VSphere and newer on SAN, but I want to do all things well from beginning. Where I can find a best practice document about SAN and VSphere? I'm looking for some recommendations on design and deploy for SAN. How much size for VMFS? How many VMs are recommended?

I hope that some of you can help me. Thanks for take your time on read this

Bye.

[jintoa]

goto http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/

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[weinstein5]

Also check out the SAN Configuration Guides on the documentation page - http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pages/vsp_pubs_esx40_vc40.html

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[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

What types of SAN are you using FC/iSCSI/NFS? Neither ways, you should architect your storage to be redundant using multiple storage processors connected to multiple switches/multiple HBA guests. For the LUN size, its between 400-600GB would be good and do not put too much guests on a single LUN to prevent from iSCSI reservation conflict and tend to be I/O bound and result in "thrashing". Standard rule of thumb is 4-6 VMs per core and it depends on types of applications loaded. Always start with 1 vCPU and 1024MB ram to start with and increase if needed. Not recommended to use extents within datastore so plan accordingly. If you need to use RDM for sql, exchange or file server purposes plan accordingly since it has limitations on which mode to use. I would read best practices from VMware guides and use your vendors best practices as well. Good luck in your design!

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant