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Thank you gentlemen for your input. It has always been my stance to keep ESXi OS and VM datastores separate whether on Local or Shared storage... As always there are conflicting views about this at the different forums, but your comments reinforce my views on this matter. thanks again
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Thank you gentlemen for your input. It has always been my stance to keep ESXi OS and VM datastores separate whether on Local or Shared storage... As always there are conflicting views about this at the different forums, but your comments reinforce my views on this matter. thanks again

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We are planning a deployment of 2 ESXi 6 hosts and creating VMs to install the HP VSA storage system on them. There has been some discussion as to the best way to configure the HDD RAID on the ESXi Hosts for optimal capacity on the VSAs. One option posed is to created One large RAID5 of All HDDs in the box, install the Hypervisor to it, and use the remaining space for the VSAs. The second option posed is to install the Hypervisor to its own dedicated RAID1 set and create a RAID5 with the remaining disks for the VSAs. Is there any advantage to either option detailed above? I was once told the Best practice for ESX was to install on its own dedicated RAID1 array, but never truly got confirmation of that.
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We are planning a deployment of 2 ESXi 6 hosts and creating VMs to install the HP VSA storage system on them. There has been some discussion as to the best way to configure the HDD RAID on the ESXi Hosts for optimal capacity on the VSAs. One option posed is to created One large RAID5 of All HDDs in the box, install the Hypervisor to it, and use the remaining space for the VSAs. The second option posed is to install the Hypervisor to its own dedicated RAID1 set and create a RAID5 with the remaining disks for the VSAs. Is there any advantage to either option detailed above? I was once told the Best practice for ESX was to install on its own dedicated RAID1 array, but never truly got confirmation of that.

HP VSA on ESXi Best Practice

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.

Storage

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

RAID is data storage technology that allows multiple drives to be used together as a single virtual drive for reasons such as fault tolerance, reliability and performance. 

There are several different levels of RAID that determine how the data is stored and the level of redundancy achieved across the drives.

RAID

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.