Designing MSA1000 for VMWare vSphere

[habibalby]

Hello,

I have got hp MSA1000 SAN 300x14 Disk with the latest Firmware 7.0 A/A connected to 4 ESX hosts.

Two of the hosts has got Dual-Ports HBA and two hosts with single HBA port.

I want to redesigning it to configure LUNs for best performance and to gain best capacity out of this SAN.

On those vmware hosts, there will host SQL 2000, Oracle 9i, Exchange 2007 CCR, Informix and other applications that are not much I/O intensive.

Could some of please give some tips on which best approach to take achieve this?

Thanks in advanced.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise) to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business). - Hp Forum moderator

[Martin Smoral]

There are lots of ways to configure this. here are 2 Options.
1) put all 14 disks in 1 array. Carve out your logicals using R5 and R1 as needed.
This will give you the best performance, but it puts all your data on 1 array and if it goes down then everything will go down.
2) Create 2 Arrays of 7 disks each, divide up your Apps between them. you will lose some performance and little space with another parity drive but you will gain some fault tolerance, if one array goes down your other apps will still be up.

Also remember the maximum size for a logical unit in a MSA1000 is 2 TB

[Albatross]

Hi,

As long as I remember, the MSA1000 is not in the Compatibility list for Vsphere 4, you might want to check for yourself:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Good luck,

A

[habibalby]

Hello,

Thanks both of you for your reply. I know the MSA is not in the HCL of VMWare, but I'm using it in our testing and development environment.

Any other recommendation regarding the disk spindles, Raid Configuration and Strip Size, LUNs Size provisioning, multipathing... etc etc...

[Joshua Small_2]

Hi,

The key thing with VMWare is to remember it has a 2TB LUN size limit. Discussions around building one LUN out of 14 x 300GB disks should therefore be reconsidered.

[habibalby]

Hello Joshua Small,

Thanks for your reply. But don't you think that I can build one Array out of 13x300 GB and 1 Online Spare. And from that Array I will be creating Volumes "LUNs" to be assigned to the ESX Servers?

[Joshua Small_2]

Well then I guess i should rephrase.

Do not attempt to create a single LUN with > 2 TB of capacity.

[habibalby]

Hello once again,

No, I never create LUNs greater than 500 GB.

What I used to do is LUN around 200 GB or 195 GB. So, i can store around 10 ~ 11 VMs. I don't stress the SAN at all and to avoid SCSI reservation as well.