Storage layout validation

[jwall04]

We are in the process of setting up several new ESXi 4.1 (free) servers in a K-12 school environment.  I am hoping someone can look at our attached storage plan and validate it, let me know if anything pops out as being a bad idea, or not the ideal way to do go about it.

On the physical server we're going to have 3 vms at this point, DC, DF and IMG.  DC is the schools Server 2008 R2 DC, DF is a light Win7 app server and IMG is a linux app server for imaging, we're thinking FOG currently, but this may change.

The physical host server has 24GB RAM, we're thinking we'll start the DC off with 8GB, this server will be used for DNS, DHCP, file and print, for a max of about 450 users.  I've increased storage space from what the current school servers have, but we have space to grow if we need to.  The DF server will have 2GB to start since it's not doing much, and the IMG server will get 4GB.

Aside from the C:\ on the DC server we plan to make 4 more volumes, each on its own vmdk to make backup (probably with ghettoVCB) easier.  The D:\ volume will contain a share for hosting simple kiddie applications (client machines will have shortcuts pointing here), E:\ will have a share for aux apps, F:\ will be where we store user profiles and G:\ will be where users store shared data.  DF has just one partition, and IMG in addition to the root partition will have a a mnt point for storing images.

I've tried to load balance the vmdks across each of the RAID 5 arrays, the load is just a guestimate, we can move from one datatore to another later if need be.  The datatore block size I chose is based on the maximum file size (vmdk) I expect we'll need.  Looking at things now though I think we might want to change DSR05-02 to 4MB in case DC_3.vmdk needs to grow past 512GB.

Please let me know if you need more info to validate this setup.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi Jeff,

Your plan looks fine only that I would suggest having a backup server as well since you having AD, it's always good to follow best practises and having backup AD as well as File Server thereby you will be able to use DFS. You mentioned having multiple ESXi server but all your VMs are in 1 ESXi server only, if you have spare server than install ESXi that will allow you to balance your VMs as well as create backup VM for AD, FS, etc

As you grow you can also implement vCenter Server to centrally managing all ESXi hosts and VMs.

With the 2MB block size you will be able to create VMDK of 512GB max so consider your data growth as well and type of data kept in such VMDK.

Hope the information is useful

Nikhil

[jwall04]

Thanks for the reply Nikhil.  We will have only 1 ESXi server at each school.  We are currently using NetBackup for backing up our physical servers and vms (with the agent inside the vm), but are looking to change to something else to backup the vms agentlessly in our main data center which is running a licensed version of vSphere.

I way I understand it, backup vendors have made an agreement with VMware to not support the free version of ESXi, so I will be looking into ghettoVCB to make less regular vmdk backups of the DC, DF, and IMG servers, but with only 1 ESXi server at each school and a 40MB max WAN link to back to the main data center this may be tricky.  We'll then use agents inside these vms to backup the user data more regularly.