Questions About Using SSDs With HP-VSA 1TB FREE Edition

[wbelk7777]

I am using the free 1 TB HP-VSAs to try out their performance. I am using the latest version (version 12). I am going to use them to share out SSDs that I have in my server.

My environment:

3 ESXi Host Servers

Each ESXi Host has the following:

2x Intel 8 Core Processors 2.0GHZ and 256GB RAM

3x160GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 1 with a hot spare (used for ESXi installation)

3x1TB SSDs they are individual drives no RAID (blank now, but planning to share out using iSCSI with HP-VSA)

1. For the best performance, where should the HP-VSA vm be installed? Should I install the HP-VSA vm on the SSD that I'm going to share out (I hate to waste the SSD space, but will for performance) or on the space remaining on the 160GB SAS drives? Will installing the HP-VSA on the 160GB 15k SAS drives slow the SSDs down or is everything happening in memory and it doesn't matter?

2. For the best performance, should I use raw disk mapping for the SSDs or will a vmdk on the SSDs give the same performance?

3. Is anyone running multiple VSAs on the same ESXi host.  I though about setting up 3 HP-VSAs on each host to share out the 1TB SSDs individually.  Is this a bad idea?

Thank you for your help.

[Roman Starun]

1. As far as i remember best practices, VSA should be installed on your mirrored SAS drives. It does not use it's hard drive frequently, so overall perfomance would not be sacrificed in that case. Also you would have more options for SSD's usage, not only SSD storage space.