What is your recommendation in setting up new ESXi in terms of storage?

[tech604]

New Virtualization setup.

3 hosts with atleast 32GB +each and Essential+. My question is - what is the recommended way of doing it in terms of the storage?

a. Get each hosts with miminal storage, then get a SAN for shared storage for the 3 hosts? FC or iSCSI.

or

b. Get each hosts with large disks (1TB+ each) and use vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA)?

Thanks for your help.

[logiboy123]

It depends on your budget mostly.

I would go with an ESXi embedded install with no local disks and a commercial grade storage solution. HP Lefthand is my favorite iSCSI solution so check them out. Don't make the mistake of filing up your SAN with cheap slow disks, make sure you figure out how many IOPS you might need and buy the disks to cater for this, if you can't figure this out get a consultant in to help you.

If you have fibre then you can go with a boot from SAN setup which is pretty cool but probably not worth it for just three hosts.

If you go with the iSCSI solution then you will need a minimum of 6 network ports per host for the most secure and redundant network configuration, see;

http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-design-6-nics.html

As far as license bang for buck goes if you going to use Ess+ then you should probably consider 48GB RAM per socket. You can only ever use about 80% of your physical RAM, so having 48GB per host means that you can use the full amount of RAM per socket that your license has paid for, with some extra left over.

Cheers,

Paul

[tech604]

Thanks for your quick reply.

Would you be able to mix them up with hosts with internal drives? I already have 1 of the 3 hosts. The other 2 are yet to be purchased - I can order them with embedded ESXi.- just waiting for the v5 to be released. But licensing would probably an issue here. I am getting the Essential+ that would cover my 3 hosts. Im not sure how is it going to be if I am ordering only 2 ESXi embedded and the 3rd one I have on internal drives?

[logiboy123]

AFAIK it doesn't matter whether you are using HD based ESXi or USB embedded in regards to licensing.

However I'm pretty sure you can just buy an extra USB stick with your 2 server order (so three USB embedded sticks will arrive with your servers) and then remove the disks from your existing host and plug in the USB stick.

[tech604]

Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.

[nancy31]

Glad to read your reply.  I learned something from the ideas you presented.  Thanks for sharing it with us