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Re: Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

 
Matt_HS
Occasional Advisor

Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

Not sure if this should have been posted in the VM area, but having just managed to connect to my MSA, I now need concise configuration advice / reference for a) the device and also guidance for b) best performance for VM. I have DL380G6 as a host and looking to store VM's on the MSA.
Currently have 5 146GB SAS disks in the MSA.
I have 3 146GB disks in the DL380. Is this a waste as just have VMware on it. Maybe I should add one of these disks into the MSA?

Cheers,

Matt
4 REPLIES 4
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

My two cents:

Expanding an array is SLOW so you want to get the size right the first time(15gb/h).
Assign a spare. When a disk fails and you replace it, you need to assign the new one as a spare.

Last question I don't know but I suspect that most pressure will be on the disks in the msa (will you store the vms there?).
Matt_HS
Occasional Advisor

Re: Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

Hi Johan,

Yes, looking to store the VM's on the MSA.
However, now thinking I could leave 3 disks on the DL380, mirrored with the VMWare ESX on and then a single disk for maybe a couple of basic VM's. This will provide a bit of redundancy should there be issues with the MSA?

Cheers,

Matt
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

Matt:

a. Since you are limited in the number of drives that you have... you probably want to create a single 4 or 5 disk RAID 5 vdisk (4 + a spare, or 5 with no spare) This will give you the maximum usable space on the MSA... @420GB (or @560GB with no spare).

since it is such a small amount of storage, you probably want to only create 1 or 2 volumes... 1 very large volume or 2 volumes at about 1/2 the total size.... to present to your server.

b. How many vm's do you intend to have?


You can certainly keep the 3 disks in the server. That will give you approximately 240GB to play with in case of an emergency.. or to store utilities and iso images and such. I would put the 3 disks into a single array and than create 1 or 2 RAID 5 logical disks. You can do this with the smart start CD pre-OS load.

1 small disk (10 to 15 GB) for the OS, 1 large disk for local vmfs.


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
Matt_HS
Occasional Advisor

Re: Configuring MSA2324sa fro VMWare

Hi Steven,

How significant is the spare (seeing as using RAID 5) as in my case (although we may add disks later), I'd probably favour using all the disks and no spare.

There will be around 5 vm's

I like the option for the Dl380; so to clarify, I will end up with 2 volumes on the MSA of approx 280gb each and on the DL380, if using 2 RAID 5 logical disks, another volume of about 220gb?

Are there any other areas or recommendations I should be looking into?

Cheers,

Matt