VM file Server with 600GB data and 150 users

[crazyleo]

I'm currently planning to migrate all file shares from a physical box to a virtual machine. There are currently 3 major file shares with 100GB, 100GB and 250GB of data. Should I create one single VM and host all data on it? or should I create 2 seperate VMs in order to load balance the IOs accross our 2 x ESX hosts? Currently I've got one single 700GB VMFS on a SAN LUN mapped to the ESX hosts. any feedback is highly appreciated.

[Gerrit_Lehr · Accepted solution]

This sould easily be handled by one VM, no need to create a second. I recently had a Windows 2003 File Server with 1,5 TB and app. 400 Users running in VM with very good performance and no issues. You should however locate the vDisk in a performant SAN with sufficent connection.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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[crazyleo]

Thanks for replying. I have an IBM DS4700 SAN with 16 x 148GB FC HDDs hosting a single RAID 5 array. A 700GB VMFS has been created to host VMs on 2 x ESX servers. Both ESX servers have quad port NIC cards connected to a Gigabit switch using Ether Channels. the only bottleneck I can point out is the single fibre connection between this gigabit swtich and other swithces (hosting user connections). Would this be sufficient or I need to change something here?

[Gerrit_Lehr]

Well if you dont mind having this as a single point of failure, the setup should be fine I reckon.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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