I'm setting up a new VMWare environment, and am seeking advice on how to configure the SAN storage. This is my first time setting up VMs to run in a SAN, but I have set VMWare ESX/Server in the past so I'm pretty familiar with vmware. We are a small company, with about 100 users so none of our servers are working very hard to support the load. I was able to make the case for good equipment: 2 new IBM x3650M2 servers, with 26GB memory, dual E5520 procs, and QLogic iSCSI HBAs, connected to dual Cisco 3560G switches for redundancy. The SAN is an IBM DS3300 with dual controllers and (8) 450GB 15K SAS drives. We will be virtualizing quite a few servers over this year with vSphere 4 on ESXi 4 installable. To start, we will be running 4 VMs. Servers are: 1 SQL 2005 server, and 1 IIS6 server which serves pages to employees fed by the SQL server. Another server running vCenter and SQL 08. Last one is an XP box that does not generate a lot of proc/mem/disk use. Eventually, we will probably also convert our domain controllers, and development IIS/DB servers. So over the next 2 years, I can foresee, in total, 8-10 VMs running on these hosts, maybe up to 12 at most.
Before I start conversions I wanted to get some input on my setup, specifically regarding if my storage config will be able to handle the load, or should I use a different setup. The OS images and databases will be stored in this SAN, and I'll probably set up a LUN to contain each OS and DB disk file. My initial plan is to set this up as all the drives in a RAID 6 array. My questions are:
Is it a bad idea to set up all the disks in one RAID6 array or should I divide it up more? For example use 2 disks in a RAID1 array for the OS images, and the rest in a RAID 6 array for all my databases?
Am I limited in the number of LUNs I can create? Looking at the ds3300 interface, seems that I can only create 31 LUNs.
Any other advice/observations/etc appreciated. Thanks!
