SAN storage pools for Clustered VMWare enviroment

[timstumbo]

I'm working on setting up our new SAN unit and I was wondering if there were any "best practices" for doing this for a VMWare clustered enviroment. I'm going to have 3 host servers in a cluster sharing resources. As far as the storage pools on the SAN, does this require a single pool for the cluster?

Thanks

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from Enterprise Strategy & Planning to VMware vSphere™ Storage

There are certainly best practices available - What vendor/type of SAN are you working with?

[timstumbo]

Sorry I posted this in the wrong place.

We have a EMC VNXe3150 Unit with about 18TB of usable data.

Thanks

[mcowger]

Take a look at the VNXe / vSphere techbook:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http...

All our (EMC's) recommendations are in there.

[timstumbo]

Thanks mcowger, thats exactly what I was looking for.

[TheEsp]

Hi timstumbo

Yes it's best to create separate pools for your VMware host and any physical servers you may still have

What sizes drives do you have and how many do you have

Cheers

David

[timstumbo]

I have 20 900GB 10K SAS Drives. I'm going to have about 10 VMs including application terminal servers running on 3 ESXi host. I'm probably going to set these up in a cluster so I can VMotion the VM's. I need to decide on how I should setup my pools and data stores on the VNXe3150 for the Virtual Machines and then for the File Server I'm going to run directly off of the SAN.

[timstumbo]

Also, the VNXe3150 has an option for setting up storage for Exchange, should I use that feature? I will also have one very large SQL database that supports our document application that might be worth seperating.

[TheEsp]

Hi timstumbo

20disks is not a whole lot to play with have you marked a hot spare yet ? you can kiss one of those goodbye if you haven't

I would seperate your File server pool from your ESX pool I've attached a screen shot which shows how many disk you need to build your pool.

They will be based on RAID 5 4+1 profile.

Cheers

David

[timstumbo]

David, I told you wrong.. our VNXe unit actually has 21 disk.

Here is what I've done with the RAID 5 4+1 profile you recommended.

ESXi Pool - VMFS Storage (General Purpose) - Disk 0 - 14 (15 Total Disk) Total Space is 9.4 TB

SFSS Pool - Shared Folders (General Purpose) - Disk 15 - 19 (5 Total Disk) Total Space is 3.1 TB

Hot Spare Pool - Disk 20

The EMC VNXe3150 unit I have has 2 storage processors in it, I'm going to have each pool running on a seperate processor hopefully to improve performance.