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We have a VM ESXi 5.x host using local storage (DAS).

It has 2 relatively large Logical Drives in RAID10 (10 HDD x1TB each). So, 2 LUNs of 5TB each.

We are considering creating just two datastores, one for each Logical Drive, as we believe that there is no VMFS5 added contention when dealing with local storage (there would be contention in a NAS accessed by multiple hosts).

Is there any advantage on creating more/smaller datastores?.

ewwhite
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rufo
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1 Answers1

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+1 for not just making a 20-disk+ RAID5 array!

You're not giving much information to go on... namely the types, count and workload of the VMs on the system.

My generic advice would be to just go with the two LUNs and manually balance the VM I/O workload by placing the VMs in the appropriate storage pools. There wouldn't be much of an advantage to subdividing those LUNs beyond their natural boundaries. If it were NAS, there could be some advantages from an isolation/policy/snapshot/backup perspective, but for this, no.

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ewwhite
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  • Thanks. The lack of details is on purpose, as I just want to know if there is some locking added at the VMFS level (not at the LUN level) in a local VM host. BTW: my options for the RAID are a single 20 disk RAID10 or 2x 10 disk RAID10. No RAID5 for me. – rufo Oct 24 '14 at 11:42