Storage on iSCSI - direct attachment versus VMware virtual disks

[SnoBoy]

I am configuring an all-in-one HUB/CAS/Mailbox server for less than 500 users on a Windows 2008 R2 Virtual machine and am getting ready to configure the storage I need. The two words I hate to hear most from Microsoft PSS is "not recommended" or "not supported!" I have a Dell Equalogic PS6000 and have the option of "direct attached" versus VMware virtual disks for storage of the mailbox databases. We are running vSphere with vMotion, etc.

Is using virtual disks a bad practice? Pros or cons that I should be aware of? Adding a layer of complexity that might come back to bite me?

[chris_delaney · Accepted solution]

I have a very similar setup and am currently using direct attached iSCSI volumes to the EqualLogic arrays for my Exchange 2007 mailbox stores. I also have the UM role running which actually works remarkably well even though everything is running on one VM.

This was largely because the EqualLogic reccommendations were to use directly attached volumes so that the application-aware snapshotting/replication tools worked correctly. If the Exchange mailboxes are held on a VMFS volume then the EqualLogic tools won't be able to get to them.

Microsoft have been OK about this setup and I've actually had them dialled on to our VM once or twice when we were ironing out some UM issues (although I did hide the 'VMWare Tools' icon!).

The best thing to do would probably be to create the volumes you think you'll need and attach them directly to the VM using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator then run the Exchange tool (I forget its name) to test the storage for speed and capacity.

Cheers.

Chris

[SnoBoy]

Thanks Chris - that seems to be the consensus on how to configure the storage. We are proceding that way!