ESXi as a Backup Server

[lurch89]

So our enterprise has purchased two new "backup servers". Essentially they're pretty powerful servers that happen to have a lot of hard drive space (8TB in the form of 8 1TB drives). We want to use ESXi, and have a backup VM that has a bunch of HD space, and then other VMs for various other things that are not HD intensive. My question is two part:

1) How should the physical RAID partiioning be set up (RAID5 with all drives, 2 RAID5 arrays,etc) for maximum efficiency.

2) How should the partitions be set up in ESX?

We need to back up a good 2-4 TB of data, and have room to expand. Any thoughts?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

What sort of RAID controller and system do you have? ESXi will only work with specific models. ESX(i) also has a 2 TB LUN limit, so while you could use all the HDs in a single RAID5, the controller would need to be able to split that space into smaller LUNs. Given that, I'd go with a single array. With your VM you would then need to create multiple VMDK files to get over 2 TB of storage for the VM.

[lurch89]

We have an Adaptec 5805 (I think) that is supported by ESXi. We ran into the 2TB LUN limit, and got around by just making RAID5 arrays that are 2TB in size. After rereading the question, I guess I am more interested in the performance issues with having large VMDK files and how quick the server will be if it has to go from SATA to a partition and then to a file, rather than putting straight Linux on the box and running the HDs from inside Linux. We can always put VMware Server on the Linux side. Plenty of power to be spared from backup operations!