Vmware architecture on Blades

[Matt_Malpica]

Hello everyone, so im going to install ESXi on a couple of blade servers both of them with 32 vCPU, 32 GB and 252 GB HDD, in addition to that i have a 4 TB SAN, the question is, what would be the best way to protect the HDD of my virtual servers and provide the best availability and performance, can i create a mirrow array on each of them? would it be better to use the space on the SAN, what type of array would i build? etc.. Any idea would be appreciate it...

[aacjao]

Shared storage is typically best.  You can take advantage of HA or FT in that scenario.  Performance depends on a lot of different things such as spindle count, workload, disk type, etc...  How is your SAN configured?  A common scenario is run RAID 5 on a tray with a hot spare.  There are many details you need to consider.  Hope that helps.

[meistermn]

Shared storage is not best. It is old fashion.  Short ways are better than long ways (latency).

Now Version 3.0 of nutanix is coming out.

http://www.nutanix.com/launch/

[Matt_Malpica]

Short ways? I did not get that

[meistermn]

Okay my fault. Short distances to the disks(latency).

Why should we need extra space for storage.

Why should I need a storage team and discuss every time about storage capacity and storage performance.

When capacity runs out of space why spend hundreds or even million dollar for a monolitic storage and fill it up with vm's.

[mlross]

I'm not sure I'm following; are you pinning your virtual machines to each blade? Doesn't that limit your ability to move machines around as needed?

Also, it seems that you'll still have many of the same problems with local storage on each blade as you say you'll have with shared storage. You'll still need to manage the storage (but now on multiple devices), both space and performance.