Data Store Clustering with Local Disk

[jahanzaib]

Is this best practice to do Data Store Disk Clustering on locally attached Disk Drive or only on remote Storage LUNs such as SAN?

Further for example if we have UCS-Blades with locally attached disk on its blade and we plan for Data Store Clustering.

[rcporto]

Assuming you're talking about Datastore Cluster, the best practice is to have all volumes on a shared storage, this way the vSphere Storage DRS will be able to balance virtual machines between datastores automatically. If you use local disks, the virtual machine files availability will be affected in case of a host failure.

[jahanzaib]

For now I have only local disks availability which are mounted with 4 running blades. So can we do the clustering on these data store?

[rcporto]

If you plan to have High Availability is not a good idea to use local disks, since that disks are not shared between hosts, and if a single host fails, all virtual machines stored on local disk of that particular host will become unavailable.

[jahanzaib]

Then what is the advantage for creating data store Cluster to only see the combine space :smileyconfused:? I checked at my home lab by creating cluster for 3 locally mounted DataStore on 3 Esxi host it showing the combine space only. :smileysilly::smileysilly:

Disk Cluster for 3 Esxi Host (Esxi-5, Exsi6,Esxi7)

Esxi-5:

Esxi-6:

Esxi7:

[rcporto]

The advantage of a datastore cluster is to manage and manage them as a single entity and of course provide load balancing based on space and/or I/O latency and create anti-affinity rules. You can read more about benefits here: An introduction to Storage DRS