Best way to use local disks

[shantur]

Hi,

I am not a Vsphere expert and have inherited a VMware estate with 16 MacPros (Cyllinder ones) running ESXi with VCSA all hooked upto an iSCSI LUN over 2 x 10G ethernet.

We use this to run our CI build agent VMs, these are linked clones of a VM and hence we get the ability to scale up and down very quickly. All this is ok.

Now the question is, on each of these MacPros there is 1TB of SSD disks which are very fast and perform better than iSCSI, so how can I best use them considering

- I don't want to loose ability to create Linked Clones for quick scale up / down

- I want to use vMotion atleast across some hosts if not the whole cluster

I looked at vSAN but it needs minimum of 2 disks per host and its not a possibility on MacPros.

What are my best options to use the fast 16TB storage.

Regards,

Shantur

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

You basically have two options depending on if you want capacity + performance or just performance. The first option that gives you capacity is to create discrete datastores from each SSD on each host that acts as a high tier of storage, for premium workloads. The second option, if you're licensed for it, is to use vFlash Read Cache to use the SSDs as a read cache layer. As the name implies, it's read cache only, no write-back, so depending on your workloads and their behavior, you may or may not see performance benefits.

[shantur]

Thanks for suggestions.

Is there anyway i could share a discrete datastore among other hosts for vMotion?

[daphnissov]

No, local datastores and shared datastores are two different concepts. You can still migrate VMs between hosts even without shared storage, however.

[shantur]

You can still migrate VMs between hosts even without shared storage

Can it be automatic vMotion as part of Automatic DRS or only manual migrations in this case?

[daphnissov]

It wouldn't be considered a vMotion at that point, and no it can't be automatic.

[shantur]

Thanks a lot for clarifying me.