File Server best practice for creating partitions/volumes

[dbachour86]

Greetings,

Trust you are doing well. I am having a HPE HC380 Cluster, which includes 3 ProLiant DL380 G9 servers. The running version of VMware ESXi is 6.0.

I want to create a Windows Server 2016 File Server VM which will host all my data. According to what I was reading in the internet, the best practice to create a vmdk file with maximum size 2 TBs. My provision for the File Server is 6 TBs of storage. From VMware perspective, what's the best practice to create 6 TBs partition?

I was thinking to format those vmdk files and create a dynamic diks (Spanned), but the issue is that I don't have a backup solution in the mean time.

Kindly advice,

[daphnissov]

You can easily create a single 6 TB VMDK if you'd like in order to avoid any other abstractions to produce that amount of size.

[dbachour86]

I was using actually two partitions before. 15 TBs and 7 TBs, but they created an issues for me after making snapshots. So, I prefer to stick to 2 TBs x3 partitions.