ESXi and P2000 G3 ISCSI: one big volume or several smaller volumes?

[jason liu_2]

I'm setting up P2000 G3 ISCSI SAN for company's new ESXi4.1 servers. The SAN has 12x600GB disks in it and set up as RAID6. And we set up a 6TB vdisk on it. On this 6TB vdisk, only 2TB will be used by the ESXi servers. I was thinking to create 3 volumes: 1 for storing all the VMs' "C drive" files, 1 for storing Exchange server's database files, and 1 for a file server's hard drive which will have all the users files.

But my colleague said since it's the same RAID array and same SAN, there won't be any performance gain by doing so versus creating one big 2TB volume and store all the files on it.

So I think I'll look for some advices here before I go ahead set everything up. Thanks for your input.

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

In order to get the maximum sequential performance from a vdisk, you should only create one volume per vdisk. Otherwise you will introduce randomness into the workload when multiple volumes on the vdisk are being exercised.

[Joshua Small_2]

Consider also that under VMware, separating a single VM onto three several LUNs creates an administrative nightmare.

Even if a single disk performed slower (it doesn't) I would still recommend it.