Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of yo_bee
yo_beeFlag for United States of America

asked on

ESX 6.0 Best Practices for datastore size

I currently have an older ESX 5.1 cluster (3 hypervisors) that I plan on upgrading to 6.0.  This environment is running about 70 machines and one of them is and Exchange 2010 running as a guest.  The OS is installed on VMDK's, but the databases are stored on iSCSI RAW mappings within the guest.  This was built on this practice that running DB's on vmdk was not a good idea.  I know things have evolved.  

So now I have a Forest and Domain migration due to rebranding of the company. I figure this would be an ideal time to also do an upgrade of my Exchange to 2016 as well and move all the DB's to vmdk's.
Questions:
  1. Is it a good practice to store Exchange DB's and Logs on VMDK?
  2. What should the maximum size of the vmdk be?
  3. what is the maximum size that the datastore should be.
  4. The storage is on Netapp 2240 Filer using 15K SAS
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of yo_bee

ASKER

We are not using snap mirror for backup.

Currently we are using agent based backup within the guest to backup exchange as if it was a physical server.

Each one of my current DB's on 2010 are close to being 500 GB in size.  I guess with the migration. I can trim each IT them down to 250 so I get 2 per store.   What are your thoughts ?

Will windows and exchange 2016 run on ESX 5.1 ?
Will windows and exchange 2016 run on ESX 5.1 ?

Yes, but remember that ESXi 5.1 is no longer supported by VMware.

Maybe time to consider an upgrade.

Windows 2016, is NOT supported on ESXi 5.1.

and at present Microsoft recommends NOT deploying Exchange 2016 on Windows 2016, due to issues. (that may change, or has changed)

As for Exchange DB sizes, split them, and use different datastores.
Avatar of yo_bee

ASKER

That is that plan to get my system up to at least 6.0.  I saw something that Exchange 2016 needs to be up to CU3 for it to work on Server2016.
Avatar of yo_bee

ASKER

Thanks for you help