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SAN controller speed

We are looking into buying SAN storage and currently the highest speed switch we have is a 1gig. We want to use the SAN storage along with hyper-v to virtualize a total of about 20 machines. Do you think the 1gig limit will have significant impact on our environment? Would it be necessary to upgrade our switch or do you think it could work with what we have?

Paul Solovyovsky

Depending on the IO of the VMs 1GB will usually work, keep in mind is that most SANs have at least two interfaces that you can aggregate so that you actually have 2GB of throughput if you configure properly. In most small environments you should be ok but you have to get the metrics and figure out what your IO and throughput will be.

Ted Pezzullo

ASKER

Ok, thank you...I am fairly new to this. How would I go about getting the metrics and figuring out what my throughput will be?

Gerald Connolly

I don't think a single 1GbE switch is going to handle the traffic for 20 machines! (NB "B" = Bytes, "b" = bits)

So a 1Gb link is 100MB/sec, and shared across 20 machines thats only 5MB/s per machine.

And this SAN traffic will be on top of the normal traffic you already have on your network.

You need to work out what the data volumes/traffic on the SAN will be, and provision your network to cope.

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Paul Solovyovsky

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Ted Pezzullo

ASKER

thanks!

Gerald Connolly

Its a shame you have already chosen an answer (a bit quickly to my mind).

with 20 machines how many are going to be domain controllers etc a couple? what are the other 18 doing?
do you really want to restrict your machines to 12MB/sec per machine? thats a really old SLOW disk!!