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SteveDavidson
Contributor
Contributor

VMFS - All Drives?

I am just getting started with setting up a two host esxi/vsphere essentials environment for provisioning mid tier and back end virtual machines (app server and database) to my developers and testers. I imagine I will have a boatload of questions over the next few months as I climb the mountain. Smiley Happy

But whatis troubling me today is storage related. I will be using only local storage. On two x3550 m2 machines I have 4 300 GB 10,000 SAS drives and 2 73 GB 10000 SAS Drives. My question is, do I make all of these drives VMFS drives? Or are VMFS drives only for virtual machine files? If I give a virtual machine 50 gig of space, does that space need to be on a VMFS drive? Any other suggestions for configuration of my local storage are of course welcome.

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marcelo_soares
Champion
Champion

WIth ESX you don't have too much to do with the free local space. I would suggest creating additional datastore(s) on them.

The VMFS can handle any type of file, but, of course, it is designed for large files like the VMDK ones. As it have a very big block size, you will waste space by keeping small unusual files on it. Besides VMDK's, I store ISO files on it to attach to VMs.

If you give a VM 50GB of disk space, have in ming you have some variables:

- If you have 2GB of ram on the VM, and no memory reservation, ESX will create a 2GB swap file with the VM

- If take a snapshot of the VM, it will be created a delta file, which is the changelog for your disk. This file will grow until you delete the snapshot.

Wish you the best luck with your new ESX servers.

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310/410

Technical Support Engineer

Globant Argentina

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Marcelo Soares
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