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hzsk
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-21-2011 03:35 AM

HP P2000 FC - Raid, Vdisks, Volumes, LUNs

Please,

can someone help me with following?

I need to properly configure FC SAN storage for use with vSphere (ESXi hosts are HP BL460c).

I must configure HP P2000 Storage with 7x 300GB 15k SAS and 5x 2TB 7,2k SAS.

My plans are:

  • RAID 5 from 6x 300GB + 1 300GB spare. This RAID will be used for vSphere production.

I am not sure about vdisks, volumes and LUNs configuration. Somewhere I have read that HP recommends use just one volume for one vdisk.

But if I have one vdisk RAID5 from 6+1 disks, I want to have at least two volumes - one 1TB and one 0,8TB. Is this mistake or can it be?

Than I am not sure how about LUNs for ESXi hosts. It´s better to have one big LUN for all ESXi hosts or more each ESXi host will have its own LUN?

  • RAID 5 from 5x 2TB (without spare). This 10TB vdisk will be splitted to 3 or more volumes (I know that this goes againts HP recommendations but I dont need one huge 10TB volume) - some for DATA storaging, some for vSphere testing and backup

And additional question - what about best practises in chunk size of RAID (should I left the default value 64KB)?

Can you help me, if my thinking aim the right way, or am I definitely wrong?

Thank you,

HM

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3 Replies
idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal
‎06-21-2011 04:01 AM

the practice is that each of the LUN needs to be share by all ESXi hosts, this allow vmotion, storage vmotion and etc to work. On the size. please make sure it is not more than 2TB as it would not be recognize by ESXi. you might want to create multiple smaller vdisk like 800GB or 1TB.

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hzsk
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-23-2011 12:24 AM

After some more reading, I decide make it so:

  • vdisk 1 - RAID 5 (6+1) from 6x 300GB 15k SAS + 1x 300GB 15k SAS spare - chunk size 64kb (RAID capacity 1,8 TB)

          - volume 1.1 - 1TB - for VMFS with 1MB block size (for VMs with max. 256GB virtual disks)

          - volume 1.2 - 800GB - for VMFS with 2MB block size (for VMs with max. 512GB virtual disks)

  • vdisk 2 - RAID 5 (5+0) from 5x 2TB 7k SAS without spare - chunk size 64kb (RAID capacity 8 TB)

          - volume 2.1. - 2TB

          - volume 2.2. - 2TB

          - volume 2.3. - 2TB

          - volume 2.4. - 2TB

     ... I´m not sure about this dividing, but if VMware can not recognize LUN with size >2TB, I don´t want to make volumes with more than 2TB.

Can some expert write here, if this is acceptable?

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krik0011
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-30-2011 06:28 AM

Check out this document:  http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-3801ENW.pdf   - Configuration best practices for deploying VMware vSphere 4.1 on the HP P2000

Also, I wouldn't worry too much about block size we choose 8 MB by default for all our DS's after much research.

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