vSphere Storage Appliance

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  • 1.  Datastore Best Practices

    Posted Dec 08, 2010 06:37 PM

    I am new to the Virtualization world. I've setup my first virtual machine and it seems to be running fine at the moment. Before i go any further, should I have one datastore for all virtual machines or one datastore per machine?



  • 2.  RE: Datastore Best Practices

    Posted Dec 08, 2010 06:49 PM

    Hello and welcome to the forums.

    Generally speaking, you will want to have multiple VMs on fewer datastores. What can you tell us about your setup, storage and the size of your implementation?

    Good Luck!



  • 3.  RE: Datastore Best Practices

    Posted Dec 08, 2010 06:53 PM

    Right now i have one datastore 50GB hosting one virtual machine running Server 2008 R2 64bit. The overall size of the iSCSI SAN is around 5.5TB available.



  • 4.  RE: Datastore Best Practices

    Posted Dec 09, 2010 02:21 PM

    Are you doing any SAN replication? How many VMs do you expect to have?

    The size limit for a LUN presented to ESX(i) is 2 TB - 512 bytes, so think of that as your largest VMFS volume size. You can use extents to go beyond the 2 TB - 512 bytes VMFS volume, but unless you have a really good reason to do so this should probably be avoided.

    50 GB is definitely on the small side for a datastore. A lot of people will go with something in the 500GB -1 TB range, but as with most things virtual - it depends on your shop/setup.