Virtualize VC or provide VC with LUN to support Update Manager?

[HendersonD]

I have Virtual Center running on one of the blades in my IBM Blade Center. I want to install Update Manager but after doing a bit of reading realized I do not have enough hard drive space on this blade to support all the updates that Update Manager will be pulling down. I have two choices:

1. Do a P2V on Virtual Center and during the process expand the C drive on the resulting virtual machine to 500GB

2. Install Microsoft's ISCI initiator on the current VC, carve out a 500GB LUN and provision it to the VC blade, and then make sure that Update Manager is set to store its files there

Any suggestions? Pros and cons of each?

I do have my VC database on my SQL server instead of on a local copy of SQL Express. Either way I go I will be putting the Update Manager database on SQL as well.

[dconvery]

I would recommend a separate LUN. The hotfixes will tend to take up a lot od disk space. Even with a huge C: drive, you run the risk of filling it up and crashing the server. If you like the idea of higher availability for your VC, go ahead and build a new one as a VM or P2V the existing one and connect it to the existing DB. Then use an iSCSI connection or an RDM for the VUM files.

Dave

[HendersonD]

I will probably virtualize my VC server but not use the C drive to store the VUM files. Once I virtualize my VC, I am still a bit confused about how to provide this additional space. I have a single 500GB NFS volume I use to store all of my virtual machines. Once I do a P2V on Virtual Center, it to will reside on this NFS volume. Exactly how do I provide another 500GB space for VC to put its Update Manger files:

- Do I carve out a 500GB Lun and use iSCSI to present this lun to my VC server as an E drive?

- Can I just expand my NFS volume to 1TB and somehow present the additonal 500GB to the virtualized VC server?