I am working on setting up our vSphere 5 environment. With vSphere 5 you can go > the 2TB VMFS datastore size that you were capped at with in 4.x, etc. What size datastores are people using and whats a good way to determine the correct size?
Thanks,
Chadd
Refer the below article which are relevant to VMFS5
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-1-vmfs-5.html
Good day,
This is an oft-posted topic in the VMTN forums and beyond. There are probably as many answers as there are folks asking the question. I like to look to those trusted in the community for answers, so let me point you towards Duncan Epping and Gabe from Gabe's Virtual World. Their two posts about this topic give two expert opinions on the matter and should give you a good place to start.
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/06/23/vmfslun-size/
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/storage-how-to-size-your-luns/
Epping notes two general questions to ask about the environment before continuing:
and uses the following formula:
round((maxVMs * avgSize) + 20% )
where maxVMs is the maximum amount of VMs you want per datastore and avgSize is, of course, the average size of a VM.
Gabe uses an average number of .vmdks per datastore, also based on the average size of each VM. This can be an important design consideration if you split up your .vmdks into their respective datastores, such as OS, data, vswap, etc.
I also worked with one fellow who liked to use nice, (large) round numbers for all his datastores. The smallest were 500GB, then 1 TB, 1.5 TB, etc. Then he'd split up .vmdks as mentioned above, for OS, data, vswap, paging, etc.
One important thing to keep in mind is your I/O - too many .vmdks per datastore that are too active could lead to storage latency issues.
Cheers,
Mike
https://twitter.com/#!/VirtuallyMikeb
http://LinkedIn.com/in/michaelbbrown
Message was edited by: VirtuallyMikeB
