Should I virtualise physical servers with large disk sizes?

[Thelay]

Hello,

I am looking for some advice on virtualising some physical servers with large disks. I have 5 servers with approx 400GB of data on each server. The servers don't do a great deal in turns of processor and memory so they are good candiates to become virtual machines. However, I am concerned about virtualising servers with such large disk sizes.

I use VCB to do a weekly backup on all my virtual machines and am concerned about the impact of such large disk sizes.

If I was to virtualise the servers what would you recommend:

• A single virtual disk of 400GB or break it up?

• Place each one on a seperarte LUN or shared LUN?

Has anybody virtualised large disk sizes before and did they experince any performance or operational problems? I need to determine to include them in my virtualisation project or exclude them. Any help or advice would be a great help.

Thanks

[depping]

welcome,

Should be no problem at all. I virtualized servers with up to 2TB of storage without a problem. it just depends of the amount of I/O they generate and the shared storage you're using. Generally speaking 400GB is just fine, no need to carve it up in pieces. I would place them on seperate VMFS datastores just to be sure. But you should be able to have other machines, low i/o, on the same datastore without a problem. keep monitoring with VC or esxtop to find out if there's anything slowing you down. but i would not suspect it to be a problem

Duncan

Blogging: http://www.yellow-bricks.com

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[depping]

By the way, VCB also shouldn't be a problem. Keep in mind to leave atleast 10% of your VMFS free for the snapshots that VCB takes. Otherwise you will end up filling your VMFS datastore and all vm's will stop running.

Duncan

Blogging: http://www.yellow-bricks.com

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".