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marcelovvm
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Doubt about the best ESXi + Storage infrastructure

Hello everyone,

     I am a newbie still in use of the "VMWare ecosystem". We use ESXi 6.0U3 (free) on our servers (7 HP Proliant servers with two CPUs each) with about 20 VMs (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.). We also have two Iomega (old) storages with 27TB - Sata III each, in RAID 6, which we use to store working files (Excel, Word, Autocad, etc.), file backups, VM backups, etc. . The VMs are stored on the servers themselves (each has 600GB) and the ESXi is installed on a 16GB SDCard. The servers have 4 network interfaces of 1GB each that we normally distribute one by one for each VM (on average each server hosts 4 VMs). Only the core of our network (connection between servers) is in gigabit, the access network of the workstation is 100Mbits. This is our current scenario ... and it can certainly improve VERY MUCH !!!

     But my initial doubt is: one of these VMs is a fileserver in Windows 2012 which we connected via iSCSI the two storages (attention ... the connection of the storages is with VM W2012 hosted in an ESXi ... it is not direct in ESXi). This fileserver shares several folders / files (with NTFS ACLs) for our users. I know we could connect the storage (one or both) directly to the ESXi and thus create a VM stored in those storages. If we did that the VM would be the fileserver created with 15 TB (today our mass production data). Our current scenario, connecting storage using iSCSI directly to a W2012 VM, is worse or better than the scenario I described (storage connected using iSCSI directly in ESXi)?

     How would the best use of network interfaces be? Two ports for the SAN network and two ports for the LAN?

Live long and prosper,
Marcelo Magalhães
Rio de Janeiro - BR
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