LUN size recommendation in ESX 3.0.2

[jslarouche]

What is the recommended best practise in LUN size for ESX 3.0.2 formated as a VMFS3 volume?

[MR-T]

VMware published a good doc on SAN setup:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_design_deploy.pdf

I usually keep my LUNS below 600GB and don't run more than about 15 VM's inside each VMFS volume.

That said, it does depend what the VM's are doing. Mixing up your low, medium, high I/O VM's will give you the best performance.

[Rob_Bohmann1]

This question has come up frequently in the forums, and it truly depends on your envrionment, the i/0 characteristics of the servers you virtualize, the numbers of servers you will virtualize to start and your expected growth rates, the size of the servers (vms disk space), whether you will use snaps, vcb. One other comment is that you will need to experiment a little to see what fits best for your environment, and so you should not carve out/format all of your storage on the first day. A last suggestion is to create a utility lun for storing iso's, and other common files that would be helpful for all servers to see, I used LUN0 for this in each datacenter and made it much smaller than the ones used to store the vmdk's on. FYI we used 300 + 500 GB luns for the most part. Remember that if you need a vmdk file size larger than 256 GB, you need to format it with a block size larger than the default (1MB).

Read through the documentation, search thru the forums for related questions, here is an example of a similar question that was posted recently.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=723284򰥔

Besides the SAN setup guide that Mr.T suggested, (must read), you may want to review other guides as well. You can find them all here http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pubs.html

[jeremypage]

We are using 350 gig LUNs. They are chunks of a 12 disk RAID5 array on a DS4500 with 320 gig SATA drives. Right now I am spindle bound with about 1/3 of the usable space not utilized but the plan is to add another shelf, swap it to RAID 1+0 and then I expect to be able to carve the remaning 1.5 TB into LUNs and assign it.

I am working the (#$ out of those disks though - and most of my apps are read intensive with very little writes (mostly web servers as a front end to an Oracle DB on a pSeries box).

I also have a couple of 350 gig LUNs on some FC RAID 5 arrays with 8 disks each for my more I/O intensive VMs.

Edit:What's your storage situation, what kind of applications are you running on your VMs and how many VMs and ESX servers do you have? What kind of hardware on the ESX boxes?

[jslarouche]

Great info everyone.. We are planning on moving to production with this current setup with two weeks and looking for SAN LUN sizing suggestion.

Our Storage situation is EVA8000 with four HP DL580G4 attached with each 32gigs of RAM two hp 4gb pci-e HBA cards, two quad intel nics each connected to two cisco 3750 switchs each uplinked to each 6500 cisco core switch for full redundancy at the network level. The SAN has about 4terabytes of disk available for VMware Virtual Server and snapshotting capabilites. We are planning on P2V'ing as many low hanging fruit servers to this new setup/implementation using power recon. We are finalizing our dev/testing tasks and we are moving to production within two weeks.

We are running virtual center 2.0.2 with the database being on another 64bit Sql2005 database physcial server attached to the san which the luns are being replicated to our offsite that has like to like hardware.

We are planning on virtualizing virtual center 2.0.2 and have platepsin power convert replicate this VM to our off site location. Which it currently holds another EVA8000 with 120T of disk for our other Windows BOOT TO SAN servers. We have another ESX HP DL580G4 that is attached to EVA8000 that host our replicated VM in our isolated DR environment that we test in.

The last thing we need to slice up is how big we want to go with our LUN sizing..

I'll go thru the links above and go from there..

Anyone else have any tips or suggestions?

[elaurs]

Hi,

we are running with 1 TB LUNs, with approx 35 guests on each LUN and it works great.

We have virtualize our VC and that runs perfect as well, so no worries there.

While that said, I find version 2.0.2 a bit buggy - but a part from that - all the previous versions have been running just fine.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers

/Rico

[psharpley]

Are you replicating all of your VMs and if so, how are you doing it?

[jslarouche]

If your running 1 TB luns with 35 guest what type of speed of drives are running them on? 7,200rmp? 10,000 rpm? or ooober fast 15,000 rpm?

[jslarouche]

We are using Platespin Power Convert replicating at the block level.. We purchases the Enterprises version of the product.

[elaurs · Accepted solution]

Hi,

we have IBM DS4800 and the speed of the drives are 15.000 rpm, 146 gb.

Cheers

/Rico