HI,
I'm firing up a PROD farm using an LSI array with Brocade FC fabric. VMware, both their engineers and documentation, evade from answering what is a typical setup for supporting 4 hosts (vMotion) and approximately 100 VMs. I don't want to hold anyone's feet to the fire, I just need to know what is typical and the easiest to support. My last position, I supported two SAN environments with three hosts each (no vMotion) and they dedicated a single LUN at 220% (iSCSI Netapps) per VM for snapshots. If VMware has a 128-LUN limitiation, this could pose an issue in fairly short order.
Is 4 LUNs OK? 8? How would I (you) label them and categorize them?
Thanks much,
Carl
1. I try to keep the LUNS 300-500GB in size to keep them managable.
2. Add 500MB to LUN creation overhead, add 5% to each ntfs for vmdk overhead, add memory of each virtual machine for swap file and about 10GB for snapshots
3. I try to balance low I/O and medium I/O machines a LUN and try to keep the same OS on each LUN so that we can have single insance memory page sharing which can cutdown paging by 20%
4. Large virtual machines I keep on their own LUNs, usually over 250GB since the VMFS lun needs to be a different block size
5. You can setup LUNs per VM function, subnet, vlan, etc.. this personal preference
6. Setup a LUN for ISOs and templates, it will make is easy to keep track of them
Just a few notes from recent projects, there are many ways of doing this.