Question about virtualized setup re: storage

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Nocturnal

Gawd
Joined
Jul 20, 2006
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805
Do most people usually setup say an ESXi server with guest OS and then also have a separate NAS or SAN setup to provide the storage for those servers?

What would you recommend for someone on the cheap who is trying to learn more about virtualization and servers in general regarding setting up storage.

I have a ESXi box with 2x150GB Raptors and 1x1TB HDD.

What would be an ideal way to set this up to split the 1TB drive amongst the guest servers on the ESXi box?

Or should I try and get another box setup to use as a NAS?
 
Normally the space is formatted with VMFS in its entirety. So its a bit different than you're thinking. The VMFS volume is really for the ESXi server, then the VMs reside as files on that, including their virtual disk files. Just create the VMs in the free space, and create the virtual hard disks however large you wish. I'd be careful not to over do it, you'd be smart to leave some headroom in the VMFS volume for swap files to get created, logs, and snapshots if you ever wish to take them. I usually leave 10-20%. You can use thin provisioned disks on the VMs to save space if you wish.

You can get a NAS if you wish, but its totally possible to setup ESXi on the physical server, then create virtual esxi servers, a server to host an NFS export/iscsi targets, and a windows box to run vCenter. Heck, you can even have a nested virtual machine to vmotion around in that environment if you wanted to go so far...
 
Ideally it's nice to have two physical ESXi servers, a physical or virtual vCenter, and a separate NAS running NFS and/or iSCSI. Then you can get experience with the real meat and potatoes of VMware using VMotion, Storage VMotion, Fault Tolerance, HA, DRS, etc.

You can still do that with an all in one box running a virtual NAS, but performance will suffer so I wouldn't ever run anything on the virtual NAS you care about.
 
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