Storage Question vSphere 6.5

[DPfeiff]

I have one physical server, an HP ProLiant DL360 Gen 10, running vSphere 6.5 ESXi from a microSD card.  When setting up the server, I configured the 8 SSD's in a RAID 10.  Should I make the resulting drive a single datastore for hosting my VM's?

[SupreetK · Accepted solution]

Yep, one LUN (logical volume on the RAID) to one datastore is what is advised, always

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Cheers,

Supreet

[golddiggie]

I would make the single RAID volume (or LUN) a single datastore. You won't be able to do any kind of svMotion tasks though. If you don't have any VMs running on the setup (yet) then I would break the RAID virtual drive set and make it into two volumes. IIRC, you can still do RAID 10, but have two virtual disks at the hardware level (LUNs) and then have two datastores. It makes life easier down the road for when you need to do a svMotion to change the provisioning easily. Otherwise you're locked into just going from thin to thick configurations (can't go backwards without a lot more work).

[DPfeiff]

Thank you for the clarification.  I'm limited at this time with what I can do.

[DPfeiff]

Thank you.  I may kick myself later down the road, but I'm going to leave the RAID volume as is.  It's not a lot of storage space and I'm looking at adding additional network storage next year.

[golddiggie]

You say that now, but hat 'next year' time frame will get away from you and it will be sometime later than that. Or you'll encounter an issue that could be [easily] resolved IF you had two datastores instead of just one. IIRC, you can add drives to the RAID set, and then split the array into smaller sized virtual drives. Which will show up as LUNs to the host and then you can turn them into datastores. It's pretty easy to do IF you don't have any VMs living on the setup yet. If you do have VMs there, then you could pull them down from the host (to a large drive connected to the system you administrate from) to keep them (but not running, unless you also have VMware Workstation and want to go through running critical items that way, which could present you with different issues). Then change the host side storage configuration and send them back up to the host. IIRC, exporting as OVA/OVF should keep the amount of space needed to a minimum.

I hope to add another NAS to my home lab in the coming several months. I also want to change out my hosting hardware/server to something that will like vSphere 6.7 (and beyond). I'm probably looking at a decent amount of money, which will be the main scheduling decider. I hope to get something with new enough processors so that i don't need to worry. Which means E5 v2 or newer chips.