Store data disks with the VM?

[Taelo]

I've been reading some whitepapers that suggest a maximum number of VM's to run per LUN. With that being said, would the recommendation be to "store disk with the virtual machine", or on a seperate datastore? In what senario would you want to do either of the two?

[AntonVZhbankov]

Storing different disk on different datastores makes sense if these datastores have different characteristics, like different RAID level.

It also makes sense when you have VM with high I/O load on one of the disks and you want to isolate this load to separate disk group so it won't affect other VMs.

In all other cases store disks with VM.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Taelo]

If you are running just a single disk group, is there any need to seperate the datastores?

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

If you have single disk group less than 2TB total in most cases there is no need to make separate datastores.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Taelo]

Anton, If the disk group is larger than 2TB what would be the recommended course of action? Break up the disk group into smaller chunks? Is the 2TB number a best practice? Do you have any links to best practices documentation that I could read?

Thank you for your help Anton.

[AntonVZhbankov]

You can create several logical volumes (LUNs) on one disk group. Logical volume must be 2TB minus 512B or less. And it doesn't matter how it lays on physical storage.

There is no best practice. It depends on each actual case and actual environment.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru