ESX 3.5 Storage Design - Help

[Ranger_rkm]

Hello,

I'm in the process of laying out my storage infrastructure, and would like some input from you experts, as this is my 1st time doing such work.

I'm setup using:

FC SAN @ 4GB

10TB total space

20 VMs

I'd first start off with using maybe 300/700GB LUNs. Any ideas here

Second

First Design for basic role - Windows 2003 R2 Servers.

create 300/700, maybe meet in the middle 500GB.

then should I place the C:\ (os) drive and D:\ (data) drive on one LUN, say for 5 VMs.

So to keep the VM with its data, is this a recommend procedure?

I would then plave the other in the same fashion, except the database servers, high I/O stuff

Second Design for database role - Windows 2003 R2 Servers.

create 300/700, maybe meet in the middle 500GB.

then place the C:\ (os) drive and database software on C:\

then split the Database (datafiles, logs, control files) onto seperate LUNs, so that I can get the best I/O throughput.

Also I was reading about disk shares:

If multiple virtual machines access the same LUN, use disk shares to prioritize virtual machines.

Does anyone know where I can get more info on these disk shares.

I'v read alot of online and offline stuff, but nothing has showed real world examples of how storage was setup.

Like where the OS drive or Data drive was placed, I also read were someone was talking about placing all of your C:\ (os) drives together, then all D:\(data) together.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

-Mike

[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

You're on the right track there, and we've created LUNs between 400-600GB and limited to 10-15 VMs per storage and that depends how large your guest disks consumption but limited to 15 helps reduce iSCSI Reserveration conflicts & Disk I/O. I would create a clean nice windows 2003 R2 and load all the applications, antivirus, agents nicely and convert them to template. Deploy new virtual machines from template and create additional vmdk on top of it using existing LUNs available. For database and file servers, we've use RDM for slight performance differences but lack of flexiblity of VMFS so you can pick between. I would use VMFS anytime now for any purpose though. I would create seperate LUNs for Databases, logs files and OSes if you can manage them. Curve your LUNs with appropriate RAID 5, 10 and usually 10 is great for database but lost 50% overhead in disk space and it should be good for OLTP and the rest of applications can run fine with RAID 5.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant