ESXi 5, NTFS, LUN

[dsshanghai]

Hi,

we have following situation:

2 Dell Servers running VMWare ESXi5, 1 as a Main Server and 1 as a Backup Server. Both Servers are connected to a Dell PowerVault Raid System using iSCSI.

When we got the System one LUN has already been created on the RAID System using all the Space available.

We would like to store all VMs on this RAID System. Also should be a NTFS Filesystem on the RAID System, which we will use as storage for a Windows File Server.

Can we use this one LUN to store the datastore for ESXi 5 and the NTFS Filesystem, or should we create two different LUNs, one for the datastore and one for the filesystem?

As I'm new to VMWare I do not know how the datastores are stored on a LUN. Can somebody point me to a documentation where this is described?

Thank you in advance

Stephan.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - ESXi uses LUNs like any other server - typically it will use the entire LUN and format it at as a VMFS datastore - theoretically you could create two partitions on the LUN and format one as VMFS for the ESXi server and one as NTFS -

This might help you out - http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage...

[Josh26]

Hi,

Whilst I'm sure there is a way - I think you're going about thsi wrong.

If both your servers are running ESXi, then every LUN would generally be built with VMFS, and a VM on top of this can be configured with NTFS.

I don't see any reason that you would need a windows file server to sit outside the VM environment with its own LUN.

[rickardnobel]

We would like to store all VMs on this RAID System. Also should be a NTFS Filesystem on the RAID System, which we will use as storage for a Windows File Server.

This Windows file server, will that be a physical server or be running as a virtual machine?

[dsshanghai]

Thoughts were to have a Windows File Server as a Virtual Server but put the managed Filesystem outside of the actual Virtual Server.

But I don't know if this is a good solution.

[rickardnobel · Accepted solution]

dsshanghai wrote:

Thoughts were to have a Windows File Server as a Virtual Server but put the managed Filesystem outside of the actual Virtual Server.

But I don't know if this is a good solution.

If you really want the Windows file server to have its "own" LUN then it is possible, however it is not recommended by VMware to have anything other than VMFS on a LUN with a VMware partition on it. If you really want you should create two LUNs, one for VMFS (for all other VMs) and one LUN which through a so called RDM is mapped to the virtual Windows server.

However, as have been noted above, the best solution is most likely to create one large VMFS LUN and then keep all VMs virtual disks there, including the Windows file server.

[dsshanghai]

Thank you for your help.

As suggested, we uses one LUN to store all VMs together with the fileserver filesystem.

Working fine until now.