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faster4233
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Equallogic PS4000E and VMware

Hi,

We have an EqualLogic PS4000E with 16x SATA 1TB drives.  Has anyone ever used a similar setup?  and how did you get on with it?

Also how much of a difference will Raid 50, or Raid 6 make compared to Raid 10?  I know 10 provides better performance but is it really worth the 5TB loss of space?  or would we be just fine with the Raid 50?

We are currently running around 30 VMs on 4 ESXi 4.1 hosts.  The stores will we hosting all of these and our file shares serving around 300 users.

We also have a slight worry that we have the wrong conrollers for the setup.  We bought the thing with Duel controllers each with 2x 1gbit ethernet ports.  What we didnt realise is the second controller sits idle in a failover position.  Is this really enough throughput to float 30 servers and a file share?

Thanks for the help Smiley Happy

David

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vmroyale
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Hello.

The PS4000E is a solid device.  I have a customer with one and it is working out very well so far.

As for the RAID level, my customer went with RAID 6.  The loss vs performance argument is going to come down to your workloads really.  The RAID 6 seems to be a good compromise for my customer's general use workloads and they are running file/print, SQL, various apps and Citrix on it.

The dual controllers is the way to go.  Make sure you install the MEM plugin on your ESXi hosts and you will be impressed with the performance of this unit.  But again, the 30 servers is going to be entirely dependent on the workloads and their requirements.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com

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vmroyale
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Hello.

The PS4000E is a solid device.  I have a customer with one and it is working out very well so far.

As for the RAID level, my customer went with RAID 6.  The loss vs performance argument is going to come down to your workloads really.  The RAID 6 seems to be a good compromise for my customer's general use workloads and they are running file/print, SQL, various apps and Citrix on it.

The dual controllers is the way to go.  Make sure you install the MEM plugin on your ESXi hosts and you will be impressed with the performance of this unit.  But again, the 30 servers is going to be entirely dependent on the workloads and their requirements.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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AndreTheGiant
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RAID50 could be a good choice to have good performance.

With SATA disks and a RAID5 could bring some limit in I/O write.

For the PS4000 this is the only controller option.

Don't worry too much about the number of active NICs. And in any case, in the future you add another member and increase the number of NICs.

PS: follow the best practice for vSphere as documented on the Equallogic site and remember to build your volumes smaller than 2 TB - 512B.

PS2: if you have vSphere 4.1 Enterprise or Enterprise Plus you can also benefit of VAAI ( http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-14090 ) and MEM (the native multipath modules for Equallogic).

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
Ravi1987
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Hi ,

i have done the same configuration you mentioned . Environment is running without any issue. please keep below mention in mind.

USe best practice guide Dell equallogic with VMware and try to use dedicated iscsi traffic for storage.

Ravi