joolsc
03-27-2009, 08:06 PM
Hi all,
What would you consider is the best practice for mounting drives within a Windows 2003 server VM?
We have 8 hi-spec HP blade servers with local VMFS volumes all using HP USB keys with ESXi, are are looking at consolidating all the storage into a pair of HP ML350/370s with 8 300GB SAS drives in RAID 6, we are trialing DSS at the moment but wanted to ask which is the best way to move to iSCSI.
Should we:
1) Create LUNs to hold the vmdk files for each server's C:(OS) and D:(DATA) drives, and mount multiple LUNs which contain each server as separate datastores within each blade?
2) Create small LUNs to hold the OS only VMDK and mount a separate LUN for data drive using MS initiator within each Windows instance? Would this be quicker for data access?
3) Something else?
This could all get a bit messy and also don't want to end up with the problem we have at the moment which is that the physical drives all have quite a bit of free space but not enough to squeeze a server into so we end up with gigabytes of unusable space!
Any direction would be very useful if anyone has any?
Thanks
Jools
What would you consider is the best practice for mounting drives within a Windows 2003 server VM?
We have 8 hi-spec HP blade servers with local VMFS volumes all using HP USB keys with ESXi, are are looking at consolidating all the storage into a pair of HP ML350/370s with 8 300GB SAS drives in RAID 6, we are trialing DSS at the moment but wanted to ask which is the best way to move to iSCSI.
Should we:
1) Create LUNs to hold the vmdk files for each server's C:(OS) and D:(DATA) drives, and mount multiple LUNs which contain each server as separate datastores within each blade?
2) Create small LUNs to hold the OS only VMDK and mount a separate LUN for data drive using MS initiator within each Windows instance? Would this be quicker for data access?
3) Something else?
This could all get a bit messy and also don't want to end up with the problem we have at the moment which is that the physical drives all have quite a bit of free space but not enough to squeeze a server into so we end up with gigabytes of unusable space!
Any direction would be very useful if anyone has any?
Thanks
Jools