I am replacing my VMware host and have a question on the best practice to setup the local storage. Currently I have three Dell servers with embedded vmware 4.1. My new host have 4 300GB SAS 15k drives. I am currently booting directly to an EMC SAN using iSCSI. My plan is to continue to boot directly to a new EMC VNXe 3300 SAN using iSCSI. What is the best approach to using the local storage?
1. Create a Raid 5 but only use it for the vmware install?
2. Create a smaller Raid for the VMware then another one for space to be used latter?
3. Another option all together?
Thanks in advance for your help,
Don
if you install your ESXi on this RAID group, the difference will be available as a local Datastore .
Hi Don,
You can continue booting your ESXi from SAN and can create raid 5 out of 4x300 GB SAS drives and create VMFS datastore from ESXi to leverage that local storage space available in that ESXi host.
Regards,
Sumit
This sounds like exactly what I want to do but how should I configure the space for the ESXi to be installed on? Can I have just one big RAID group that has EXSi and the rest available for storage?
Thanks for the reply.
Don
if you install your ESXi on this RAID group, the difference will be available as a local Datastore .