Best Practice - Raw device mapping vs Virtual disk

[NZSewell]

Hi

A quick question regarding configuration. WHat would be described as the best practice for setting up a guest server which required a large amount of disk space? Which is the preferred option:

1. - Create a VM with a raw device mapping to the LUN (on a san)

or

2. - Create a VM with another large virtual disk which sits in a datastore on the LUN (on a san)

Thanks

Dave

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

Sincy you're limited with 2TB anyway (except using software iSCSI from inside guest OS), the only arguments are:

1) Use RDM if it is possible that you'll connect to this LUN physical machine. Or you already have LUN from physical machine like a big fileserver.

2) Use VMFS in all other situations - vmdks give you flexibility, you can migrate VM wherever you want.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[NZSewell]

Cool, as I thought really, Both options are OK, it just depends on how you want to handle it, but using vmdks just gives you a bit more flexibility.

Thanks