MSA2324FC Storage - please help

[Milovan Milic]

I am building a system for school. I have bought most of the hardware. Only need extra host and extra MSA70 Array. Please see setup picture.
I will be hosting there around max 20-30 vm's (light servers like print servers, applications, file servers, epo, wsus,) and Exchange 2010 for max 300 users

we have physical servers for AD, vcenter and etc
We do not have money for ent. storage so this was the result from advise of one consultancy.

Well another company said that this storage is bad design. that we would experience very bad performance and etc. He suggested that we should have look at dell solution with iscsi. Well I hear other bad stories with dell storage.

We have already spent money on this setup. Well not all still I need to order extra host and msa70 array with 25 disks.

Please can anyone share real experience and performance with this HP 2324FC storage with MSA70 array. Do you use it with esxi 4.1 and what do you run on the storage.

Thank you !

[Jags_21]

Hi,

The storage system is very much compatible with vsphere 4.1 environment, coming to performance it always depends on the configuration which is done, the pictograph attached seems no issues for me.

what i would suggest is to create the datastore with large capacity for an optimal performance so that you need to come to point were you require to extent the datastore (though vmware maximum datastore size is 64TB with extents, i suggest adding extents are not an best practice), in case you are creating a datastore of 2TB make sure you follow like 1024MBx2 - 512 bytes which is the best way to calculate and even for the extent of 2TB should follow the same.

find more info in the article
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/3371739

Regards,
Jagadish
PS do not forget to assign points

[NXS]

Hello Why not take and MSA2324 SAS in stead of FC, you don't need the san switches and will get almost the same performance as on the FC, and you can connect 4 servers redundant to it.

But it seem you already have the MSA2324FC
The best practice is to create to 2 vdisk each presented 2 a different owning controller.
And create a vdisk with allot of disk spindles (for raid 5 at least 10 to 15) if more the 15 disk in 1 vdisk go for raid 50

K