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Dell Equallogic PS6000X - VMware vSphere setup

Please forgive me if this question seems a little much. I am struggling to understand the relationship between my iSCSI device and my vmware machines.

So far I have 3 vmhosts on seperate blade servers, a vcenter server on a stand alone machine and a Dell Equallogic iSCSI device.

I have made a datastore on the iSCSI from vCenter and it works great.

My question is, what is the best practice in setting up my vm guest OS(s) using the iSCSI?

Do I make one giant volume on the iSCSI for the VM machines to use?
Do I make a new LUN for each of the guests?

I want vmotion and the ability for vcenter to swap virtual machines from one host to another.

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bhartwell

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jimmyray7

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kevinhsieh

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Steven Vona

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Ok so let me see if I understand all this.

First, the difference between vSphere iSCSI and guest OS iSCSI.

vSphere iSCSI would be a datastore on which I can install the VM machines.

GuestOS iSCSI would be storage available to the guest OS to use just like a local disk.

Second, If I make one large volume on my iSCSI for all my VM's I will be fine. No need to make a seperate volume for each VM, or group of VMs.

kevinhsieh

VMware has a caveat that a single datastore can only be 2 TB, but otherwise I believe that your understanding is good. Maybe a VMware expert can confirm the VMware stuff.

jimmyray7

You've got it. Just create your datastore in the vSphere client on the Equallogic array, and start building VMs. The virtual drives you create in each VM will be stored on the Equallogic volume. vSphere takes care of all the storage info, the guest OS just sees a normal hard drive.

Good luck, let us know if you have any other questions!

Steven Vona

ASKER

I am sure I will have more questions! VMWare is a lot to learn, I will create more questions for sure.

Thanks for the help!