What is rules of thumb for virtual disk

[vmrsb]

Product - VMware VSphere 5.5

What is rules of thumb for creating virtual disk for virtual machine running Microsoft Windows 2008 R2.

if I want to have 2 TB of HDD for virtual disk for storing user data.

Should i create 4 virtual disk of 500GB ?  OR  simply just 1 virtual disk of  2TB virtual disk ?  Take into consideration of file access performance and backup & recovery.

What is the recommendation ?

[virtualg_uk]

There is no real issue creating a single 2TB disk as long as the OS / Partitioning method & backup software support it.

If you need continuous space on the OS, I would be looking to creating a single VMDK for the VM.

Creating several VMDKs and "RAID 0 'ing" them together on the OS side is adding another point of failure as your underlying storage infrastructure should already have RAID protection in place.

I hope this helps.