Size datastore (best practice)

[amateolo]

Hi Experts

In previous vshpere versions I always heard that the best practice is the 2 TB maximum datastores.

In the current versions with VMFS 5 or 6 and vsphere 6.7 or 7

what would be the best practice? Many small (2-3 TB) or 3 or 4 large (10-15 TB) datastors

¿?

Regards?

[tayfundeger]

VMware is not mentioned here, but it will be useful for you to have 5 or 10 virtual machines in a datastore. Each datastore has a unique performance. Having too many virtual machines in a datastore will negatively affect performance. It is good to deploy virtual machines to as many datastores as possible. Because in case of a datastore problem, only virtual machines under that datastore will be affected.

Don't put all the eggs in one basket.

[beze_work]

Of course, this cannot be ruled out in practice, because practically every VM wants a disk larger than 2TB, I have several machines that work with a 10TB virtual disk, and they did not ask for a physical disk, they were satisfied with the virtual one. In addition, if I share small disks from the same storage, to what extent does it protect against errors? max is enough, if only one is filled, the machine stops at one, but a much larger one is much more difficult to fill. Performance... there are flash drives everywhere, it's a shame to talk about it...

[a_p_]

One reason for the 2TB maximum was the limitation with VMFS3. With current VMFS versions you can create datastores with up to ~62TB.

I'm not aware of any Best Practice for datastore sizing. It basically depends on your infrastructure, the number, and sizes of your VMs, ...

In case you have a storage system with multiple controllers, you may want to create multiple datastores to distribute the load on the controllers.

You may also want to consider multiple datastores depening on the VMs size, and workload.

André