EVA - Mixing UNIX, vMware, Linux, Windows Vdisks on a Single Diskgroup or Separate?

[Alzhy]

Aware that having separate diskgroups may be wasteful and somewhat "less performing" - would it be a good idea to have separate Diskgroups on a fairly large and rapidly growing / utilized EVA8400 (27 Shelves)?

Also If one Diskgroup is farily "busy"/levelling - or doin' its own thang ;^) - does it affect the other Diskgroup?

[Mark Poeschl_2 · Accepted solution]

I would keep the number of diskgroups to a minimum. Rather than different OS as a criterion for creating a separate group, I recommend using reliability or access patterns. For example - create a separate disk group for database log files vs. data files so that if an entire group fails you can still rebuild your DB. Create a separate group for data that will always be accessed sequentially rather than at random. Do not create a separate disk group for each OS.

As for your second question - a single set of controller CPUs does all the work for ALL disk groups so yes there is a small potential for a levelling/busy disk group to affect overall storage array performance. Having said that, levelling and other background activities are always lower priority than user I/O so I think the risk of impact is quite low.