vSphere 5 ESXi Host - RAID config best pracitce?

[BrianFurner]

Hi all,

I am pretty new to VMWare and am wondering what the best setup is for RAID

I have a HP DL380 G7 with 4 x 600GB SAS drives.

This is just a lab/DR server, and I was intending on setting up a RAID-5 volume with no hostspare. Can I partition the RAID and put the ESX software on one small partition and use the other partition for datastore? If possible is this best practice?

I imagine that there would be a performance hit by having the same RAID volume doing reads/writes on the ESX software and storage at the same time. Would I be better to throw a couple of 72GB in a RAID 1 in the server as well just for the ESX software and perhaps to store some ISOs?

Thanks!

B

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Don't worry about ESXi. It runs completely in memory and only stores configuration changes and logs to the HDD. I would go with the RAID5 setup you mentioned.

André

[matt232]

If its just for a lab you could boot ESXi off a USB stick and then setup all your local disks in raid X as a datastore. All you'd have to do is setup persistant scratch storage by having a .locker file on one of the local datastores. From what I've seen that only takes up about 2MB normally but it will expand and contract as you upgrade, install agents and use disk swapping.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=103369...

http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/04/scratch-partition-best-practices-for-usbsd-booted-esxi.html

Might also want to double check your Syslog.Local.DatastorePath is set to the default []/scratch/log/messages

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101662...

Scratch that (sic) ESXi 5 it should be Syslog.global.logDir is set to the default []/scratch/log

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=2003322

[a_p_]

Discussion moved from Virtual Lounge to VMware ESXi 5