I am new to VSA and need some info on disk configuration. I have 2 nodes, both with 4xSSD and 8xSAS-drives. ESXi will be installed on a flash card. Please let me know if I have got this right:
Install ESXi on flash card
Configure 2 arrays on each node. Should I use RAID1 on the the 4 SSD drives and RAID5 on the SAS drives?
Install VSA from ovf-image and store it on the SAS-array
Configure 2 datastores with Network Raid 10, one with SSD and one with SAS
Is this correct? If yes, how do I configure Adaptive Optimization?
2) configure array of SAS with 2 logical drives a small logical drive for the VSA guest ( 100GB or less) to act as local Datastore and the rest for "shared storage"
3) configure array of SSD drives can be raid 5
4) install VSA on ESXI using the SSD (tier 0) and SAS (tier 1) as storage for the VSA so you will be able to use adaptive optimization (also it is good to use the stoarage of the VSA as RDM drives so you will not see them as datastores)
to enable local disks as RDM goto configuration > software > advanced settings > remove V from RdmFilter.
5) do the same on the other ESX node
6) create Storevirtual cluster and export Datastore as shared storage for your VMware cluster
Adaptive optimization is enabled by default if your VSA has 2 tiers.
