DRS and Datastore cluster

[parthmaniar]

Hello,

I hope members at the community and their loved ones are safe and healthy.

I am a self-funded student with a homelab having a single compute device (Dell Precision workstation) with 4 physical storage devices and volumes (each physical device is a volume running VMFS 6:

1. 2TB, 2.5' SSD (non-enterprise grade)
2. 1TB, 2.5' SSD (non-enterprise grade)
3. 1TB, M.2 SSD (non-enterprise grade)
4. 1.5TB, iSCSI attached NAS storage (Syonlogy NAS running 7200 disks in RAID-1)

I have mixed workloads with some requiring high IOPS (Elastic stack) and other requiring medium to low IOPS. I usually create a VM with two parts:

• OS on a separate physical disk
• Data store mounted from a different physical disk to ensure IOPS are guaranteed.

Here are my questions:

1. Can I combine all of my volumes (mixed storage types)?
2. Is there any advantage in doing so (besides learning 🙂 ).
3. I manually allocate disks (such as creating VMs on the NAS storage to offset wearing for the SSDs) - Will combining storage wear out my non-enterprise SSDs quicker?
4. Any downsides from doing this?

I have a single compute device and hence no DRS for compute.

Thank you very much and stay safe and healthy 🙂

[DavoudTeimouri · Accepted solution]

Because you don't have storage device so there is no tiering feature available and mixing the disks doesn't have any additional benefits.