multiple VSA on one ESX host

[EdwardWang]

Recently we need to expand our lab, the new-added server storage and StorageWorks each has 14TB after RAID 5, meaning total I have 14+14TB Storage; however, we found that VSA for vSphere support up to 10TB, then

the question A  is that does that mean I have to create more than one  VSA on one ESX host? if the answer is yes, then the question B is that I only reserver one 10GB network port to switch to link other VSA. can I just share one network port with 3 VSA in one esx host?

or do you have any suggestions?

thank you very much in advance!

[oikjn]

for simplicity you should look at the cost to upgrade the license to the 50TB license instead of the 10TB license.  I don't know what the premium is, but I would be curious to hear what it is.  

Do you really NEED all 14TB?  If you can get away with just the 10TB then I would seriously consider sticking to it.

I've run two VSAs on the same host, but you have to be careful about HDD resource conflicts and I I would think this would be a situation where that would be an issue as you would be sharing both the raid card and probably the raid LUN as well.  Before AO, I ran two VSAs on a single host with one for SSDs and one for SATA and it wasn't really a problem, but if you are concerned about bandwidth of a 10GB connection, then you are pushing the performance of a VSA anyway and I think you will run into sharing issues.

[HPstorageTom]

Running multiple VSAs on a single ESX server is not recommended.

If you need to do it, then you should ensure that the VSAs hosted on a single ESX server are in different StoreVirtual cluster.

[Sbrown]

You should run a separate controller for each VSA as well as separate drives. IE 2 P420/1gb FBWC for 1 DL380 going to 8 drives (2.5") each.

then of course do not place them into the same cluster group otherwise one server will take out both upon loss.

It works but ESXi is not very friendly when sharing SAS/RAID controllers or target drives at all! By leaving dedicated paths to all hardware (CPU/NIC/P420) you can definitely get away with a DEV/TEST on the same server