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I have an esxi 5.1 on a 1U server, accessed using vSphere. There are two 160G HDD's inside on RAID1. I'm looking to expand the number of VM's and the required storage is going to exceed this paltry amount of storage. I would like to increase the drive space, but am wondering what is the best course of action. The 1U has two solid XEONs and lots of RAM so I'd like to keep this as the HW resource. If I provision another box full of 1TB HDD's can I access them as an external datastore? Would this be an implementation of iSCSI? Or would it be better to get 2 bigger (2TB+) HDD's and replace the 160GB drives instead?

solly989
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  • possible duplicate of [Can you help me with my capacity planning?](http://serverfault.com/questions/384686/can-you-help-me-with-my-capacity-planning) – Rex Feb 21 '14 at 20:18
  • I'll look over this and let you know if it answers my question. Thanks edit---it's not helpful – solly989 Feb 21 '14 at 20:18
  • lots of options, lots of different ways. You can setup VSA within vmware, you can do VSA with 3rd party providers, you can buy a SAN.. a lot of what you will need will depend on your I/O needs. In general, if you want to run any production level workloads, you probably want something more than 2xNLSAS/SATA drives. – Rex Feb 21 '14 at 20:19
  • Yeah, this is more lab and research. My thoughts are really to expand the esxi storage capacity only, whether the VM images are stored on two big local disks or a cluster of disks on a remote system. For example, run an LDAP, DNS, SSHD, and POP3 via four different VM's, and then have room to add a large File server on yet another VM. Maybe later on I want to add a LAMP or Sharepoint rig, but the fileserver eats up all the storage space....If I have an array of large disks can't I access them over the network to build future VMs? – solly989 Feb 21 '14 at 20:27
  • I have my CCIE lab with a linux-GNS3 combo and some other virtualized machines for networking, the bottleneck on my layout is that the HDD disk space is exhausted. Need to expand it to add other network services that will run on the VM platform – solly989 Feb 21 '14 at 20:29
  • To anyone that comes back to this, I'm going to implement an iSCSI SAN and point the ESX datastore to the SAN. I'll place the SAN in its own subnet with some ACLs and also CHAP the client/server setup. I wouldn't do this if I had 10/100, definitely will be bundling 2xGigE connections to keep things zippy. – solly989 Mar 11 '14 at 04:12
  • I actually wouldn't bundle your gig links in an LACP/etherchannel/LAG connection. You would want to use MPIO that is part of most enterprise SAN's and utilized by VMWare. – Rex Mar 11 '14 at 13:20
  • Thanks Rex. Found some docs for this http://fojta.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/iscsi-and-esxi-multipathing-and-jumbo-frames/ – solly989 Mar 12 '14 at 22:09

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