The issue with thin provisioning with vmware is that you can't easily resize a vmfs volume - whereas if you are running with nfs as your datastore then you don't have that issue and can increase/decrease the size on the fly whenever you want.
We just migrated around 200 vms from an EMC CX4-960 to our Netapp 3040 - for us the cost difference was significant because of two things - one, the Netapp gives us about 50% dedupe savings and two, the group that manages the Windows servers uses BESR (Backup Exec System Recovery) for DR. We removed the BESR licenses from all the Windows VMs on the Netapp now and just use array side snapshots. The savings due to BESR license costs alone nearly paid for our disk shelves on the Netapp. I would echo the comments about software/feature licensing - they can add up quickly. When you do get quotes, I would recommend you get itemized ones so you can actually compare apples to apples. It usually takes us several emails/calls to EMC/Netapp to get them to deliver the itemized costs. mark From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 11:35 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN Storage Most will do thin, what seems more difficult AFAIK is reclaiming the space if you only need it temporarily, as I said though whether the price premium of NFS outweighs the "that's neat" I don't yet know. Regards capacity, around 8tb of file server departmental data and around 2tb for VM's including SQL/Exchange. From: John Aldrich [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30 August 2010 17:29 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN Storage I thought that was one of the benefits of virtually all SANs... the ability to do "thin provisioning." I know that LeftHand and virtually everyone else I've talked to offers that feature on their SANs. [John-Aldrich][Tile-Tools] From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 12:17 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN Storage Can you expand a little on "migrating away from NetApp primarily due to cost"? Regarding the NFS question, only that I've heard a lot of good things about the flexibility NFS brings you and the fact you can expand and shrink on the fly so if you need 500gb for a VM to test something you can provision it and then reclaim it - obviously without the pricing I don't yet know what sort of premium we're talking. From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30 August 2010 17:14 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN Storage We are using Dell sourced EMC's for FC storage for our VM's. We are migrating away from NetApp primarily due to cost. We are spinning up EqualLogics as iSCSI targets for our file servers and backup-to-disk options. Is there something that makes you want to lean towards NFS as a mount technology? -sc From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 11:30 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SAN Storage Looking for a little feedback folks. We've got a SAN replacement coming up in a few months. We're pretty much a vmware shop except where a service has to run on a physical server (IO cards etc.). The vendors I'm primarily looking at are Lefthand, Equallogic and Netapp, and possibly EMC since Dell can quote on an EMC solution as well as Equallogic. I've not had quotes yet, but so far my instincts are leaning towards Netapp, mainly because of the things I keep hearing about NFS for vmware, as well as the fact they seem to offer a lot of flexibility whereas Lefthand and Equallogic offer iSCSI and, well yeah, they offer iSCSI. 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