Best practice with LUNs/VMFS etc.

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

Open-E has a VMWarebest-practices whitepaper here:

http://kb.open-e.com/entry/4/


The pdf:
http://kb.open-e.com/afile/4/2/