VmWare setup,, 2TB limit
Soooo,, it has been a very looong time since my last post. But I do like to keep up on things I have learned by trial and error ... go figure....
Anyway, I am in the process of setting up two virtual servers one as primary and the other as a backup. Config as follows:
Dell R710 servers with two 2.66 procs, (6 core), 32 gig ram, (6) 600 gig scsi drives, 2.5 inch 10k rpm. I will be running VmWare ESXi 4.0 from an embedded SD card.
These came shipped setup as a raid 5 with all drives in the configuration of RAID 5, however, I decided to turn these into RAID 6 and take a little performance hit in the process as I would then be writing 2 parity bits instead of just one.
After the initialization of the drives in the RAID 6 was completed, I went ahead and booted the server into the VmWare Hypervisor, once this initial setup was done, I then downloaded the client onto a computer to begin my setup of virtual,, that is when things just "shit the bed"....
When I tried to setup the datastore on either server, it did see the LUN at 2.18 TB, but I could only setup 185.50 GB on the datastore ONLY, then this was the only partition to use for all my VM's that I would want to set up... WTF.... After doing a little research, you cannot go over the 2TB limit with VmWare version that I am using, so I had to go back into my RAID config, reset the HD's to a RAID 5 with a hot spare, reset the LUN size at 2048 GB, (2TB ), and quess what ???? There was an unused portion left over at ,,, you know it.... 185.50GB, now once the I have finished initialization of the drives, I should be able to set the main LUN at 2TB and begin my configuration of my host and vm's.
Thats my story and I'm sticking to it....
OH, you may be wondering why I am running the VmWare ESXi 4.0 from the SD card and not the HD's themselves... here is my theory on this...
SD cards are limited to how many read / writes they can preform before going bad,..
So lets say a 1 gig card can sustain about 100,000 IO's prior to crapping out.. well, since the SD cards had the VmWare ESXi installed on this,, (1 write) and then I will just boot the server from it,, load the hypervisor into RAM,, there will never be anymore writes to it,, unless I need to reinstall the VmWare software to it... I had discussed this with other techs prior to making this jump. I am still pretty old school and like to have HD's spinning, but I will see how this goes...
biz
Anyway, I am in the process of setting up two virtual servers one as primary and the other as a backup. Config as follows:
Dell R710 servers with two 2.66 procs, (6 core), 32 gig ram, (6) 600 gig scsi drives, 2.5 inch 10k rpm. I will be running VmWare ESXi 4.0 from an embedded SD card.
These came shipped setup as a raid 5 with all drives in the configuration of RAID 5, however, I decided to turn these into RAID 6 and take a little performance hit in the process as I would then be writing 2 parity bits instead of just one.
After the initialization of the drives in the RAID 6 was completed, I went ahead and booted the server into the VmWare Hypervisor, once this initial setup was done, I then downloaded the client onto a computer to begin my setup of virtual,, that is when things just "shit the bed"....
When I tried to setup the datastore on either server, it did see the LUN at 2.18 TB, but I could only setup 185.50 GB on the datastore ONLY, then this was the only partition to use for all my VM's that I would want to set up... WTF.... After doing a little research, you cannot go over the 2TB limit with VmWare version that I am using, so I had to go back into my RAID config, reset the HD's to a RAID 5 with a hot spare, reset the LUN size at 2048 GB, (2TB ), and quess what ???? There was an unused portion left over at ,,, you know it.... 185.50GB, now once the I have finished initialization of the drives, I should be able to set the main LUN at 2TB and begin my configuration of my host and vm's.
Thats my story and I'm sticking to it....
OH, you may be wondering why I am running the VmWare ESXi 4.0 from the SD card and not the HD's themselves... here is my theory on this...
SD cards are limited to how many read / writes they can preform before going bad,..
So lets say a 1 gig card can sustain about 100,000 IO's prior to crapping out.. well, since the SD cards had the VmWare ESXi installed on this,, (1 write) and then I will just boot the server from it,, load the hypervisor into RAM,, there will never be anymore writes to it,, unless I need to reinstall the VmWare software to it... I had discussed this with other techs prior to making this jump. I am still pretty old school and like to have HD's spinning, but I will see how this goes...
biz
posted by Dan Davis at 2:14 PM
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