1

Actually, it is a satellite for this question: ESXi: unable to mark SSD drive as SSD, but I just thought I would raise a separate question, since this question is not related to the error I bumped into, but rather related to the proper ESXi configuration at the first place.

So I have a DELL PowerEdge R630 server with the following disks:

  1. HDD RAID 5 built from three HDD disks 1 TB each (in total, it provides 1.9 TB)
  2. A separate SSD disk (900 GB)

There going to be lots of machines on this server, and for some of them, I would like to provide the highest performance. With this goal in mind:

  1. Does it make sense to install ESXi on a SSD disk, or I'd better install it on HDD RAID 5?
  2. Does it make sense to place on SSD those virtual machines from which I have the highest performance?

For p.2, I think it makes sense, but I am not that sure about p.1. Or, maybe I wrong for p.2, as well?

user54614
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    IMO, install ESXi on a USB thumb drive connected to the internal USB port. That will completely free up your HDD's and your SSD for datastores for your virtual machines. – joeqwerty Dec 05 '17 at 20:06
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    [Don't use USB boot on non-clustered VMware systems](https://serverfault.com/q/549253/13325). If it's a standalone server, use local disk. – ewwhite Dec 05 '17 at 21:51

2 Answers2

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You have a single SSD. Therefore, you have no fault-tolerance for the data stored on that SSD.

If I were in your situation, I'd make two logical drives (e.g. virtual disks) on the RAID controller: one sized for 16GB to hold the ESXi installation, and the other for the remainder of the array space. This presents two block devices to ESXi, and is the cleanest way to deal with your local storage.

Don't use USB boot on non-clustered VMware systems, though. If it's a standalone server, it's safer to use local disk.

ewwhite
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  1. To the best of my knowledge ESXi loads itself completely into RAM at boot time. It might use the storage it booted from for logging and crash dumps (there are advanced settings to control this) but shouldn't need high storage performance to run. So: No, I wouldn't waste my precious SSDs for ESXi.

  2. This depends on the needs of the VM. SSDs should give you more IOps / lower latencies but if your workload doesn't benefit from this- where's the point? Databases generally should benefit from SSDs, bitcoin mining (as an example) shouldn't.

Mario Lenz
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