vSphere Storage Appliance

Currently in my enviroment we have 3 hosts with Direct Storage 8 x 300GB 15k sas drives in each. We will be moving to a SAN within the next few months. My question is, when I go to deploy HA,DRS, vMotion am I required to move ALL guests to the SAN or can I leave the servers we determine are non critictal or testing on the Direct Attached Storage? Will that impact the features mentioned above? Thanks in advance!

Hi,

None of these features will actually work on an individual VM stored on DA storage. But VMware is more than capable of storing some VMs there, and some on your SAN. All these features will run fine on VMs stored on the latter.

I figured the mixed storage would not be an issue at all. I could not find my answer 100% so I was making sure. Is this an abnormal configuration or are any of you doing this as well?

Hi,

It's a perfectly standard configuration. DAS is so much cheaper than SAN storage that we regularly use this to store test VMs etc, in environments where HA runs the major infrastructure.

Good to hear. Thanks for taking the time to respond. The DAS will be the test/dev storage for the most part and possibly house a few non critical VM's, unless I get lucky and they let me go nuts specing out this SAN!