Nice! Need another vmware guy? Hehe
I run most of my configs raid0 across the board and either mirror the whole thing live with anything from datacore,drbd,, netapp, whatever. My idea being that I dont want my system running anything less than 100% if it does, fail over to a new system completely and I will repair at my leisure. So the force of a raid0 to fail the system is really what Im looking for. I could vmotion it too, again depending on overall config. Its all about spindle speed and access and seek times etc. I dont get down to all the little details most of the time, but Im sure your high end emc box runs faster than my datacore box with scsi drives with raid0 vs raid10. J From: Ziots, Edward [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 10:23 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions Honestly, We are using EMC DMX SAN for our VMware VMs with multiple LUNs masked into a group of servers and not seeing performance problems. I understand that everyone doesnt have the luxury of having a DMX EMC backed San with 16GIG of Disk cache and 2GIG QLA 2340 Fibre Channel cards per ESX server using DRS and HA. But I think that if you can do RAID 10 its the best of the disk raids, and if you take into account what your VM are going to run and how much disk-IO you are going to put on this VMFS partitions then you should be ok. I wouldnt recommend doing any type of software based raid, nor local RAID unless you got a lot of memory backed cache on your raid controllers. Also remember in V3.5i there is storage Vmotion so you can move VMs between VMFS partitions just like you was able to move VMs between servers in Vmotion, which might help offload disk IO contention with hot disks and partitions due to the VMs running on them. HTH EZ _____ From: Benjamin Zachary [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 10:10 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions Yes, there is lots of opinions and information there. The general consensus in most people complaining about performance many times falls back onto raid configs on vms. From: Ziots, Edward [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 10:04 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions I believe there is disk recommendation setups in the Vmware best practices documentation on www.vmware.com <http://www.vmware.com/> Z _____ From: Benjamin Zachary [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 9:47 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions I would sway away from raid on a vmdisk personally and use storage failover at the bit level (iscsi appliance type). There is no point in partitioning out a physical drive that I have ever known and is magnified with a vm since your r/w are happening within one large file thats spanned across the raid subsystem. If you are using this for DR I would not raid anything, and separate the vms on physical drives if you have enough space and keep a spare drive in the event of a drive failure. Obviously there are more details to consider than posted. From: Clayton Doige [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 9:35 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions Thanks all for the responses. Bearing in mind that this configuration is being designed as a disaster recovery system, where for that main, the only IO will be incoming Double Take bit level replication, would I be right in saying that if I partition the system so that there is say 30GB for the base OS, and then put everything else on one container I will be better off than my original spec below? Thanks Clayton From: René de Haas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 09 January 2008 13:01 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions Since all your Virtual Disks are on the same RAID set I dont see how you avoid problems with heavy disk IO. But this is just my thought and I am not a VMware expert by any means. From: Joseph L. Casale [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 1:49 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions My opinion is that if that array degrades, each vm is effected and the rebuild will take forever if its busy. Also, if one vm sees heavy disc IO, the whole system suffers. Not a lot of isolation there jlc From: Clayton Doige [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 4:22 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: VMWare Server Disk Config Questions Dear all, sorry if this is either off topic, or marginally stupid. I am about to spec out a box that will host 3 virtual machines for DR purposes. I wanted to run my thoughts past the list to see where the error in my thought process is, as I am sure there is one (or more) lol. The physical machine will have a RAID 5 set up with 0.5 TB usable space. I plan to partition the array as follows: Container 1, 20 GB, Host OS Container 2, 100GB, VM1 (1 virtual disk for OS, 1 virtual disk for apps/data) Container 3, 200 GB, VM2 (1 virtual disk for OS, 1 virtual disk for apps/data) Container 4, 200 GB, VM3 (1 virtual disk for OS, 1 virtual disk for apps/data) Is there anything glaringly wrong with this set up? TIA Clayton Doige Project Management Consultant Green IT Solutions Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01277844943 07949255062 www.greenit.co.uk **************************************************************************** Internet communications are not secure and Green IT Solutions Ltd does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message. 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