I have been using ISCSI from Windows Server 2008R2 and it has performed very well. It has been reliable and testing on vms as compared to openfiler its even slightly faster. One note, NFS off windows is not very good. Write speed just tanks.
But I have a couple of questions. Which stripe size is better for my storage array? On my current install I used a 256K stripe but I have reading quite a bit that 128K or even smaller may be better. I am adding another storage unit to Vmware. I have about 30 VMS, one happens to be a sql server, but its just for development. My other VMs are a quickbooks, av, seo, servers such as these.
The other question I have is, is it possible to combine multiple vhds from server 2008 and present that as one larger disk to VMware. Now I realize this question might be more of a Windows thing, but I thought I would ask, because I would assume others may use Windows for storage as well.
I use Raid 6 for various different reasons if that may influence someone's suggestion.
I also just noticed that Vsphere 5 only uses 1mb block size. Right now I am at 4.1 but plan on going to 5. So if my datastores use larger block sizes, how is that handled when I upgrade to Vsphere 5? Do I have to reformat?
Any docs that may worth my reading or answered these questions, point me in the right direction.
Thanks
Hello.
I have been using ISCSI from Windows Server 2008R2 and it has performed very well.
Just FYI - Like Openfiler, this too is unsupported storage.
Which stripe size is better for my storage array?
It depends on the workload(s). The best option is to test and see which works best, but this can be very time consuming.
is it possible to combine multiple vhds from server 2008 and present that as one larger disk to VMware
Not sure on this one, but perhaps someone else can chime in?
So if my datastores use larger block sizes, how is that handled when I upgrade to Vsphere 5? Do I have to reformat?
No, you don't have to reformat. You can upgrade VMFS-3 volumes to VMFS-5 and they will contineu to use the existing block sizes. The 1MB block size is used for all newly created VMFS-5 volumes. Unless you wanted the 1MB block size for all VMFS datastores, there would be no need to reformat.
Good Luck!