Installin the vsa

[Richard Furze]

Hi

I have recently purchased the p4000 virtual san appliance kit and the installation instructions are not very clear.

I have the vmware image which i can upload to the esxi server that is attached to the storage blade.

The question i have is where to i install the virtual appliance, on the mirrored disks of the esxi server or should it go on to the storage array itself?

[Uwe Zessin]

The VSA uses two disks 1GByte each on scsi0:0 and scsi0:1. If you want to work with a 'small' amount of storage (less than 2 TeraBytes) you might want to keep everything on one datastore for simplicity, but I think you're fine with either way. Don't forget to keep free space for the VM's swap file or you won't be able to power on the VM.

[teledata]

My typical VSA installation would be as follows:

Install the Appliance or "OS" portion of the VSA onto your mirrored drive. As the previous poster was alluding to, this will use the "non storage" drives for your OS and Swapfile activity.

Create your storage VMDKs (SCSI 1:0 thru SCSI 1:4 - you only need to create multiple vmdks if you intent to use more than 2TB, or your storage is on multiple arrays) on the dedicated storage array. This minimizes the affect of OS or SWAP disk activity by isolating it from the SAN storage itself.