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BurgerKing
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preferred method to accelerate storage for multiple VMs running SQL?

hello all - we are in the planning stages on designing a VMware environment to host a SaaS initiative.  What im currently researching is how best to insure storage performance given each guest VM will be running an application that is heavily dependant on SQL server.

My thinking at this point is going with 1U dell servers that hold 10 2.5" SAS 10K drives in a RAID 5 config.  We'd like to be able to host 20-30 VMs on each of these servers but in out testing this server config cannot support our I/O requirements for this number of VMs.

Possible solutions I am looking at include:

1) LSI MegaRAID application acceleration card.  Basically a RAID card w/ 100-300GB of flash.

2) LSI Nytro Warp Drive or similar offering by Fusion IO that acts as intelligent caching for I/O activity from each VM using large amounts of flash.

3) Host fewer VMs (say just 10) per server.

Are their other ideas I should consider?  Thoughts on the above ideas?  I'd prefer to have as dense a VM per host ratio as possible so am not real keen on option 3.  Obviously, given that option 1 is about 7-10K less than number 2 that is how I'd prefer to move forward.

Thanks for help!

-m

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