SAN configuration "best practices" for VDI deployments...

[ReverendDeuce]

Folks,

I am curious if anyone has some best practices or can make some suggestions at what has worked best for them in terms of SAN configuration.

Really, I am the most curious about the number of XP desktops per LUN that has been successfully deployed without user acceptance issues (complaints about lag, slow app load times, etc).

Any tips or advice would be appreciated!

[Troy_Clavell]

I can tell you how we are setup... It works quite well. We have 2800 vPCs running on 24 DL580G5 16 core 128GB Hosts using 2 HP eva8100's. For perfomance of the VM's we decided to go with vRAID1 on the SAN. We have 3 VCMS Instances, 4 VDM servers (1 for adminstration only), 8 nodes per cluster, 10 950GB LUNS. I think our consodiation ratio is somewhere around 8 VM's per core.

We are running 1000 VM's in 2 VCMS instances and 800 in the other. So, our XP desktops per LUN is 100 in the two instances and 80 in the other.

I hope this helps a little.

[ReverendDeuce]

Yeah, that is helpful...

What about the LUNs themselves? What is their disk configuration? Spindle count, speed, etc.

Do you have any idea what type of iop load is being generated per LUN?

[Troy_Clavell]

I don't know a whole bunch about storage, what I do know is that HP EVA's are a little differnt in the sense that all disks are used, I belive we have something like 88 450GB disks and all of them are shared acrooss the entire configuration.

I can gather more information for you tomorrow, when I'm at the office.