Esxi storage

[Tewffik]

Hi all,

I have 2 esxi under vmware vsphere 6.0
each one has local disk storage. (disks on RAID)
therefore the two servers are completely independent.
the capacity of their datastores is almost reached.
what are all the options available to increase disk space for this scenario?
I haven't done the vmware training yet, but I'm trying to progress slowly in learning

Thanks

[e_espinel]

Hello
Your query is more Hardware related than VMware vSphere related.
If your server is branded (Dell, Lenovo, IBM, HPE or others) you could look in the service guide or using the serial number how your server is configured. This means how many slots on your server are supported, how many are free (could be 4 or 8 or 16 disk slots bays), which disk controller is installed on your server.
Another way is to contact your hardware vendor where the server was purchased and ask what disk growth options the server has.
If you tell us the make, type, model and serial number of your server, we might be able to help you.

Only after performing a disk upgrade on your server, you could check how to configure and use that new disk capacity in the VMware vSphere.

[IRIX201110141]

Add a disk to the existing raid set and expand the capicity or create a new raid set with a new set of disks.  Its a HW question and depends on your server vender and raid hba. Nothing to do with vSphere in first place.  A server can have internal disk slots or by adding a additional HBA with external ports you can add a JBOD.

Placing a NAS which offer NFS or iSCSI to the two ESXi Hosts maybe also be a option.

Note: Because vSphere 6 is out of support since years it looks like your HW is rather old to spending money into into to expand the capacity may isnt a good idea.

[Tewffik]

Hello espinal,

Thanks for your feedback
There is no free disk slots bays, but by my request i need to give solution for how to increase capacity? what is all solutions or ways in this case to extend capacity?
May be, change disks with more capacity!? or add sharde iSCSI solution? or the best choice is to make shared storage...
I think it's not secure to work on local storage with vmware vsphere 
what is generally done in production

Thanks

[Tewffik]

Hi IRIX201110141

i think NFS NAS is not a good VMs storage solution, it's recommanded to use block level technolgy,NFS is a way to store ISO files..
FC solution is very expensive, and really HW is rather old to spending money into into to expand the capacity may isnt a good idea, But it's necessary
I have DELL EMC power edge R730 and all disk slot bays (8) occuped, so i am thinking what are the solutions offered for me

[e_espinel]

Hello.
The power edge R730 server is very old, its End of life is May 15, 2018.
Depending on the processor family of your server it could support VMware vSphere up to 6.7 or 7.0.

You should contact your local Dell supplier for advice on how to purchase a basic external sotorage with direct SAS or ISCSI connection that is compatible with this Server. NICs or HBAs for the server and their respective cables should be included.
The new Storage must also support new servers for when they can be acquired.

[Kinnison]

Hi,

Please, let's not exaggerate,

The thirteenth generation DELL PowerEdge systems, such as the DELL PowerEDGE 730s are starting to show the weight of their years but they are not yet scrap since they are openly in HCL for ESXi 7.0U3.

Systems of that generation were initially equipped with XEON E5-2600 V3 series processors introduced in Q3-2014 and then with XEON E5-2600 V4 series processors introduced in Q1-2016 thus it is one thing to say that that generation of systems were put on "end of sales" state during the first months of 2018, another to say that they were put on "end of life" state.

IMHO the OP has two choices, either to replace the existing hard drives with others of greater capacity or to resort to shared storage that, however, it would more easily protect the economic investment, given that in both cases it is not negligible. Then a lot also depends on the use model of those machines in the IT context of the OP because, for example, if those systems were used in a laboratory context there would also be other options.

Regards,
Ferdinando

[IRIX201110141]

The R730 is "just" 5 years old as a minimum. There is nothing wrong with it and its certified for vSphere 7.0u3. We, as a Dell shop have dozen of these.

There is nothing wrong with NFS (ask the NetApp folks...) and when you dont like NFS than every Qnap/Synology offers iSCSI, which is than Block, also.

If you dont have internal disk slots left

1. A H830 Raid HBA with an external MD14x0 JBOD
2. A 12G SAS HBA with an external RAID(SAN SAN) like old MD3/SCv2020 or newer ME5.
3. Some of the entry level SANs supports direct connect FC/iSCSI if you dont like SAS

But external SAN comes not for cheap and for the money you will get a 2nd. ESXi with local SSD storage

Regards,
Joerg

[Tewffik]

Thanks to all,

IRIX201110141 🙂
Kinnison 🙂
e_espine 🙂

I think you gave me a lot of interesting information regarding my knowledge base, it was really useful.
I contacted my supplier, and offered to do a performance audit, since I have 03 servers.
Then we will see the proposals for improvement on the storage side, cpu, memory, etc.
But already through you, I have good information to deal with the different proposals.

I just want to note that I learn a lot from this forum and congratulations to the contributors

Regards

Toufik Core