RE: ESX volume design question

Have you considered using NFS rather than FC?

It would allow you to have larger volumes (as you're not constrained by
the same VM/datastore limit due to ESX locking on block based devices)
and you'll therefore no longer need fractional reserve and will get
better dedup savings?

If that's not a possibility, you'll have to consider whether 20 VM's per
datastore is ideal; When I last used FC, best practice was less than
that.

Darren


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters@... [mailto:owner-toasters@...]
On Behalf Of steve klise
Sent: 01 June 2009 21:39
To: toasters@...
Subject: ESX volume design question


What would you do?
ESX 3.5 running all windows servers; FCP with all fiber drives
We have an existing 6030 with 1 aggr, 1 large volume with ~5 LUNS 500GB
a
piece; running DOT 7.24. (upgrading soon, so no dedupe running yet).  We
have a new HA 6040 (PAM cards) =).  The existing volume on the 6030 is
still
at 100 percent fractional reserve.  

We have SMVI running in our test environment, but not in prod yet.
We wanted to snapmirror from the 6030 to the 6040 and visa versa.  The
6040
is running 7.3.1.1 so I can only go from the 6030 to the 6040 for now.
No
vmware on the 6040 yet.
Question:
I have 3 shelves each for each head (6 300gb total for the 6040) and 1
big
aggr on the 6030, 11.5TB agr 4.97used in the volume on the 6030.

I was thinking of having the volumes for the 6040 @ 750GB and 1 LUN.  I
am
averaging ~20 windows boxes.  I figured when SMVI runs, it is only 1
snapmirror update vs running the job with allt he LUNS in 1 big aggr and
multiple snapmirrors happening.  I will make the fractional reserve set
to
50% on the 6040 with thin provisioning at the LUN level, and dedupe.

Pros:
I think its more granular.  Having to find a location for 6TB is a bit
difficult

Con:
Not as much dedupe by having all VM's in 1 volume.

Thoughts, experiences, gotchas.?
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