How Should I Configure Large Array For Best Stability?

[EsxIUser]

Hi,

I am an experienced ESX admin and now im putting in ESXi at the house. For budget reasons my disk layout is as follows.

2 - 80GB SATA Drives - Used for OS partitions only, not data

3 - 640GB SATA Drives - To be used by only one machine as its "D" drive for data.

The 2 drives will be mirrored. The other 3 will be set to raid 5. So I have the potentional for an estimated 1200+GB partition. It would be used by Windows Server 2008 and formatted as NTFS. I have never made a vmdk file larger than 200gb. Would I be okay in making those 3 drives into a "data" datastore/vmdk file that is over 1TB in size?

Is there a better way of doing this?

Im worried that to backup a file that large, I would have to shutdown the guest os, and then use Winscp to copy that file to an external USB drive possibly taking the better part of a week. I dont have powerchute for the UPS rigged up yet, and wouldnt want that file to become corrupted in the event of a power loss lasting longer than the UPS can stand.

Eventually when I save up some cash I want to build a SAN using OpenFiler and I would put all my stuff on CIFS shares. But for now I need to use what I have and ESXi.

Thanks!

[apatel1]

You can have VMDKs up to 2 TB in size (the appropriate block size must be created when formatting the LUN as a VMFS datastore). Depending on how comfortable you are with using Openfiler, you can even present large virtual disks to an Openfiler VM hosted on this same box and then present them to your 2008 VM as file shares or whatever you want.

Hope that helps! Please help me out by marking my response as "helpful" or "correct" if you feel that it was useful!

-Amit

[J0nF]

I'm trying to achieve something similar EsxIUser but on a single raid 5 with 3 x 1TB drives, I want to have a "D" drive for a 2008 server VM as file storage. So far I am leaning towards using a 1.5 partition on the array (a second array created on the same drives) with a Raw Device Mapping. I figure as I will only be using the 1.5TB for file server shared storage and I want the option to grow it easily, RDM seemed logical at least from what I have read.

Perhaps accessing your raid 5 array via RDM is a solution? From what I have read you will not hit any VMware limits and will really only be limited guest OS limits.