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Local Storage setup - ESXi 4.1

C

cphillips

n00b
Joined
Mar 23, 2010
Messages
52
Hi All

Am building a straightforward ESXi 4.1 server for a friend and it will have 4 x 2Tb drives, all contained within the server itself.

These disks will store the VMs and also any datastores.

Any recommendations on how to set the disks up - 4 seperate VMFS volumes? RAID them?

Not sure how to tackle this for reliability and performance (if both are possible at the same time!)

ESXi itself will run from a USB stick...

All offers greatly received.

Thanks.
 
Supported RAID controller, RAID them, and then carve it up in to LUNs since 4.1 can only do 2TB-512b maximum size. vSphere 5 will let you do up to 64TB LUNs but it's not out yet.
 
Thanks, will have a look and see if I can get a RAID card.

Probably be a PERC 5i, usually some of them on eBay.
 
Hi

Just a potential word of warning - I can't use the passthrough feature and the PERC 5i on my esx 4.1 server (Supermicro) simultaneously - the PERC 5/i card doesn't work. I think that is pretty common. Of course, if you don't need to use this feature then that is fine!
 
Why not? Or do you mean you can't boot off the PERC and pass it through? Because..that's right. You can't. So boot off a USB thumb drive.
 
No, if I switch on pass-through in the BIOS then the Perc 5i won't find any drives (I was trying to get an Adaptec card passed through). If I switch it off then the Perc works fine. Not touching the PERC.

Used a different card, the 3Ware card and HP-800 works fine.
 
Just to bump this thread, I've now got 2 PERC 5/i cards to use if needed, and will be running vSphere 5.

Still going to use 4x2Tb drives and boot vSphere 5 from USB.

I did look at an All in One solution but the physical box only has 16Gb of RAM and I understand that OpenIndiana/ZFS needs a fair whack (>4Gb) which would limit me for the VMs that are to be run.

Decisions decisions!
 
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