Best Practice to setup a EquaLogic PS4100X with VShpere 5

[jonnysideways]

Hello all, we have just bought a PS4100X with 12 x 600GB 10K SAS (7.2TB RAW)

This device is due to replace our existing MD3000I Powervault Device that is being used in out Vmware ESX enviroment.

What RAID / ESX Datastore configuration would people recommend.

Currnently we have the following set up for example.

2 x Raid 10 Disk Groups with 1TB Virtual Disks on each, Then the 2 x 1TB Disks are then presented to ESX and used by 2 Datastores.

any guidance would be appreciated.

[sparrowangelste]

That setup looks good.

I have one of those, and am using raid 10 as well for my stores.

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to VMware vSphere™ Storage

[jonnysideways]

The setup shown is our cuurent enviroment, not the Dell Equalogic unit. cheers

[vmroyale]

What RAID / ESX Datastore configuration would people recommend.

It depends on what you want out of the storage really. I tend to go RAID6 with the SATA drives and EQ and then often RAID50 with the SAS for light/general workloads with low and varying requirements of the disk.

What workloads are you running, or what is (or will be) your IOps requirement? The answers to these types of questions usually drives the RAID policy.

[jonnysideways]

We have a mix of Application servers. Front and Back Exchange Server. But I want to bring in a SQL 2005 Server. So there will be a mix of servers, mainly windows 2008.

There are no real high demanding VMs as yet.