Usage of Local ESX Storage

[BrianRTS]

What do most people do with the rest of the local storage space after ESX gets installed? Right now I have 10 servers in my farm with 72gb HD's.. ESX only takes up approx 10gb of space so thats 600+ gb of space that is "useless" because its not "shared" storage for vMotion/DRS etc. While I can run VM's on that space (and do).. I have no easy way of backing them up via VCB. I would have to install a local client agent on each ESX server to backup each VM.

I thought i heard about a appliance or vendor that was coming out with a way to use this empty space as shared storage but I cant recall any names... Anyone have any ideas on the best way to utilize ALL my storage?

[DazRaz]

I think the industry as a whole needs to think less of capacity in terms of Gb / Tb but in spindles. The main problem with using local storage is the usually are are few spindles and therefore little capacity to run virtual machines. Left over Gb is not capacity.

Do a calculatation on the servers per spindle you have on your shared storage. If you apply the same calculation for your local storage (which will be slower), how many VMs will you get before you see performance bottlenecks?

[esiebert7625]

Local disk is cheap so people usually have alot of it in their servers. I use mine to hold dev & test servers and also ISO files. It's also a good place to temporarily move VM's if you have to do SAN maintenance or re-configure your VMFS volumes as well as make backups of your vmdk files that are on shared storage. Also the forthcoming Storage vMotion feature gives you alot more options for using local storage because you can move a VM from shared storage to local storage or from local storage on one ESX server to local storage on another ESX storage while the VM is running.

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Thanks, Eric

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[admin]

I think LeftHand networks is the company you're thinking of... I haven't used their products so I can't comment on the quality or robustness of the implementation, but it does seem like a pretty neat idea:

http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/products/virtual_storage.php

[TomHowarth]

Drat, somebody beat me to it, LeftHand have a technology that takes local storage and presents it as a virtual LUN, again haven't seen the product used in anger but the marketing blurb seems reasonable, can't comment about preformance,

Perhaps somebody from Lefthand will kick in with a comment

If you found this or any other post helpful please consider the use of the Helpfull/Correct buttons to award points

Kind Regards

Tom,

[hfourie]

Have used Lefthandnetworks products. The iSCSI products line is called SANiQ. Works REALLY well as very easy to use. They use standard, HP kit in our case, hardware. The DL320s with 15k SAS really flies. I have also used the VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) from the Beta to now. Works rellay well. No performance problems as yet.

The only issue I see is not with the product, but maybe the market. Would someone fork out $$$ for using the software on local disk, or would they rather go and get a hw box, with dedicated disks, and have that be a SAN. The idea is good ..... Maybe if you have servers with plenty of free local disk, yes.

[BrianRTS]

Can you share how much the appliance cost or is it done by server/capacity licensing?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I use my local space as part of my backup. THis way I have the main copy on the SAN, a local copy in case my SAN dies, and a remote copy that goes to tape. The local copy has saved my bacon during a critical outage before.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074

[hfourie]

Im not sure. I know the max you can have per appliance is 2TB. Normally they charge by capacity, so not sure if it is the same for the VSA. I heard something like £4000. Please dont quote me on it..

[mrgrid]

LeftHand VSA EVAL & Performance:

[mrgrid]

Let's try this again:

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I use my local storage as a location for ISO images (/vmimages) and the location of the most recent backup of my most important Virtual Machines. This way if my SAN fails for whatever reason I can run these VMs with minimal downtime. This saved my systems a few times already! This I think is a crucial part of your backup, business continuity, and DR process.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074