Has anyone set up a VM to act as a Windows file server for Persona Management?
How did you set up the virtual hardware?
This is using View 5.3, vSphere 5.5, VMFS 5.
It's my first time setting up Persona Management. I'm going to build a virtual machine to store user profile data. Plan is to use Windows Server 2008 R2.
Easy enough, right? Before building the file server I wanted to consult the documentation specific to this product.
Confusion stepped in when reading page 5 of 28 in the VMware View Persona Management Deployment Guide. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/VMware-View-Persona-Management-Deployment-Guide.pdf
It states. "If a virtual machine is used as a file server, the volume storing the profiles works optimally if striped across four virtual disks, each with its own SCSI controller."
?!?!?!?!?! -huh?
Assumptions:
'Virtual disks' implies disks that are created to be available to the Guest OS.
'SCSI controller' refers to virtual SCSI adapters to run the virtual disks.
This equates to five virtual disks, each on a separate virtual SCSI adapter. (OS gets 1, Repository for Persona get 4)
I have two problems with this setup.
1. Striping must take place inside the OS? Is that right? So...inside of Windows as software RAID? Ugh...not necessary or a good idea in my experience. How does this trump the work already being done on the physical array? Could there possibly be such a huge performance difference in striping virtual disks? I mean...virtual spindles making I/O better? I'm confused.
2. When creating new virtual disks, I am able to choose to place it on a separate controller, but the limit to the number of controllers you can use is four. (One is already used by the OS)
EXAMPLE:
Before the additional virtual disk is created. (1 SCSI controller (0:0), one hard disk - This is the OS)
Create new virtual disk, choose different SCSI adapter (1:0)
New virtual SCSI adapter (SCSI controller 1) is created along with the new virtual disk (Hard disk 2)
I can only add new controllers up to four times, up to SCSI controller (3:0). This is the maximum limit of the VM. After the fourth, adding a new disk does not create more new SCSI adapters. So how can I stripe 4 virtual disks with 4 SCSI controllers? The first disk is running the OS, so that doesn't count, which leaves three at best. This makes no sense with my logic, which is obviously missing something.
I'm led to believe that one new virtual disk, on a SCSI controller separate from the OS disk, would be fine. (OS= SCSI 0:0, Repository= SCSI 1:0)
Can someone please either clear up my confusion or comment on how they successfully set up a Windows VM file server to act as a repository for Persona Management?
