Best Storage configuration

[ANorton]

I am trying to figure out the best storage configuration for my current ESX environment.

I currently have 10 ESX hosts and have a 500GB NFS share created for each host using thin provisioning on each of the VM's If I was to use Thick provisioning I would not have enough space. My provisioned space is more than my used space.

I am getting ready to change over to ESXi ad was wondering about changing over my storage thoughts/design. Should I create LUN's in 2TB increments? Is NFS still the way to go? Any help on the topic would be great thanks.

Aaron

[vmroyale]

I am trying to figure out the best storage configuration for my current ESX environment.

Best is going to depend entirely on your unique setup. What works best for one shop may be worst for another.

I currently have 10 ESX hosts and have a 500GB NFS share created for each host using thin provisioning on each of the VM's If I was to use Thick provisioning I would not have enough space. My provisioned space is more than my used space.

I am getting ready to change over to ESXi ad was wondering about changing over my storage thoughts/design. Should I create LUN's in 2TB increments? Is NFS still the way to go? Any help on the topic would be great thanks.

Are you having any specific issues with the current setup?

How is the current performance?

What prompted or why are you thinking about change with the stroage?

What NFS implementation are you using?

Good Luck!

[ANorton]

I am not having any specific issues to my knowledge other then getting nervous about the space. Just freaks me out seeing 1.1TB provisioned on a 480GB capacity drive and still have 230GB free.

We don't have any higher end monitoring tools to show disk performance other than what is present for Netapp and vCenter.

I currently just create NFS shares on our NetApp servers and then have the seperate kernal on an iscsi side to connect the NFS shares to each host. Each host sees all the NFS shares.

I was doing some upgrade for ahrdware and software so I wanted to check and see if there was perofrmance differences or what the storage gods had in store these days.

[vmroyale]

I am not having any specific issues to my knowledge other then getting nervous about the space. Just freaks me out seeing 1.1TB provisioned on a 480GB capacity drive and still have 230GB free.

That would freak me out a bit also,

We don't have any higher end monitoring tools to show disk performance other than what is present for Netapp and vCenter.

NetApp's NFS implementation is a good one to be on.

I was doing some upgrade for ahrdware and software so I wanted to check and see if there was perofrmance differences or what the storage gods had in store these days.

I'm fairly sure that you could change to block (iSCSI) with the NetApp, as that is usually included. NetApp's NFS implementation is pretty slick though, and if you aren't having problems it may be best to leave well enough alone. I believe that operationally NFS is much easier to deal with. Rather than changing protocols, it might be worth looking into adding some disks. This will help calm your nerves about that overallocation situation, and should also deliver additional performance.