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bhrt60
Contributor
Contributor

New user pod ESXi - need some guidence

I have download and setup a couple of Virtual Machines with ESXi

Works great.

My application - Single box for Windows 2003 SBS and Windows 2003 Std + Terminal Services

I'm now looking at setting up a Production system my question is how to setup storage.

Server hardware Intel QuadCore Xeon 2.5Ghz, 8Gb RAM, 4 x SAS 300Gb Drives as RAID5

Currently have just over 570Gb Data.

My question is how should I setup the Server given this amount of storage requirement?

The Windows Standard will be a member server and I plan on having a 10Gb virtual disk for this.

Do I create the rest as Virtual Disk??

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

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Yattong
Expert
Expert

Hey,

Welcome to the forums!

In your scenario, you already have a VMFS datastore with VM's located on it. You can no longer use it as an RDM.

So, yes you will need to create a virtual disk big enough to store your 570GB of data if you have enough space.

How many ESXi boxes are you planning to have in production?

In production, I would recommend using multiple ESXi hosts with some type of shared storage, that way you can take advantage of things like vmotion, DRS and HA etc...

Have a read of the documents on this page, it should help you along nicely.

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pages/vi_pubs_35u2.html



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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the forums - I would say just create a single VMFS data store witht he remaining storage on the RAID 5 and then create virtual disks for your virtual machines carving the storage up taht way -

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bhrt60
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks

At this point I'm not 100% sure about virtual disk for data!!

Would I be better creating say 146Gb SAS RAID-1 for the ESXi & OS's and mount the RAID 5 as a Physical disk

In Virtual environment am I going to benefit from speed of storage ie. SAS ??

(The other option I though of was to have a Physical Raid-1 using a pair of 1Tb SATA and using Rsync to make a copy of the data each night - for comfort of knowing data is availabel on a physical device!!!)

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bhrt60
Contributor
Contributor

Backup - do Tape drives work in Virtual environment.

I coudn't find any reference to Tape drives on Vmware site. Maybe I didn't search correctly!

I normally use BackupExec with say LTO3 or 4

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nick_couchman
Immortal
Immortal

I believe there are quite a few people who have had success using tape drives in ESX(i) - passing them through from host to guests. That question has been posted around the forums quite a few times - there are definitely some obstacles to getting it to work correctly, but it can be done.

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