metaluns

[sfonten]

is it best to do metaluns or regular luns with esx? i have an emc san with 19 host connected?

[wcrahen]

metaluns is a great way to get a lot of I/Os, but at the expense of a bit more complexity, also if you don't need a lot of ESX capacity you might end up with more space than what you need or sharing those disks with other non-ESX guests. It might be easier to just create smaller raid groups and LUNs for your ESX hosts, maybe use Raid 1/0 if you need the extra I/Os.

[sfonten]

would i get better performance on a 3 lun setup that is 5 disk per lun vs a metalun of 15 disk

[RParker]

NO.

More drives ALWAYS = better performance. (given the drives and type are the same).

Can't you setup a LUN with 15 drives, and NOT make it a metalun? Keep it simple.

[wcrahen]

In theory the 15 disk metalun would perform better, but if you share multiple luns out of that you may increase contention. Neither option is wrong.

[richardt]

I am current using Meta Luns. We have 3 raid groups made up off 6 disks in a raid 5 .

with 12 x 110Gb Luns per a raid group. then meta-luns are 3x 110 luns together to create a 330Gb luns.

we end up with 12 x 330Gb Luns , with a max 15 VM's per a LUN

This take into account a reasonable VMFS volume size and number of VM's per a volume

If you look at EMC testing they always use meta luns made up of raid gorups uisng 6 disk raid 5.