Newbie looking for best practices setting up my first ESXi Server.

[Symbiote]

Hello, Tomorrow I will be starting my first ESXi venture. I have ordered an HP Proliant ML350 with a Raid 5 e200i controller. I purchased 4 1TB Sata drives and plan to put them all in Raid 5 for 3TB of data storage. I currently have a Win2k3 file server which has approximately1.5TB of files across multiple physical drives shared out right now. My question is how should this data be moved to the new server? Should I build a new Server 2003 or 2008 OS VM and then do I allocate all 1.5+TB that I need to that one VM? How will this data look to ESXi? Do I have seperate virtual drives or just 1 big one? Or is there a better solution? What do I do when I start running out of space and need to allocate more space from the Raid to a certain VM? I apologize if this is a dumb question but I am just a little confused and trying to get everything lined up for when I start on this project tomorrow.

Thanks alot!

Dave

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the forums - first thing is your ESXi server will not recognize a 3 TB datastore - the maximum datastore ESXi and ESX will recognize is 2 TB - to bring you physical machine over I would look at VMware Converter that will allow you to import your physical machine into your ESXi host - I would create seperate virtual disks -

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[SkyC · Accepted solution]

You could build out the Windows Server as already mentioned, then create another virtual disk to host your data. You could then use something like robo copy to sync the data from your original data source, you could kick that off over a weekend and then use robocopy to just capture the changes before you do your actual cutover. Just be mindful of the limitations that the other person noted with the 2 TB's. You will also want to select the max block size when you create your VMFS datastore for your data drive, otherwise the max VMDK you can create will be somewhat less then you are looking for.

[Symbiote]

Thanks guys I think that really helps explain alot for me.

One other question I had was I heard about you should make sure the block size matches all throughout the setup. Is this true and what should decide the block size? Should it be the default size from the drives themselves? the raid? the filesystem?

SkyC could you elaborate a little further?

Also... Should I plan to install ESXi on a seperate drive and then leave the RAID5 for the VM's? I've heard this is a better practice. What if I were to install ESXi on a single drive and I were to loose that drive what is the procedure for restoring my ESXi server? I would expect all I would need to do is reinstall ESXi on a new drive at that point.