Guest OS & SAN LUN's

[TheAngryHeretic]

I've got a new ESX configuration that we are connecting to a SAN. The question that I have for you guys is about having a single LUN that contains multiple guest operation systems. I hope this is the right place for this. If not, sorry for posting in the wrong place, and will be happy to go where the proper place is if someone can point me there.

Thanks.

Mack

[gary1012]

Sure, it could be done that way. Would need to know more about the number of VMs, apps served, chatty or chucky workloads, etc. to be able to comment more... A best practice is to separate the VMs boot disk from the app/data but it's certainly not written in stone.

[TheAngryHeretic]

There will be DB2 servers, WebSphere servers, and I want to say Lotus Domino servers. None of which are very effencient in their resource consumption. As it stands, the ESX systems that are not connected to the SAN, and have all their data stored locally has pretty bad performace.

On the currently ESX boxes, there are usually 6 VM's. They all have 4 dual core xeon processors, 24GB of RAM, and roughly 500GB of disc space. All of that gets divided between the 6-ish VM's on each server.

[gary1012]

The SAN probably will help. You ought to consider presenting multiple LUNs to the VMs so you can spread the disk I/O and prevent hot spots. Additionally, you probably ought to look at how you're going to setup your HBAs in terms of load balancing. You have two methods available to you; most recently used (MRU) or fixed path. There are many, many threads on this board that address LUN size, HBA pathing, etc. I've found these to be extremely helpful in the past.