File Server Best Practise

[treborextra]

Hi,

Could do with some advice on this.

Current setup - 2 ESX servers and 1 Equalogic SAN

Currently have a VM (server 2003) file server. The original setup was 3 drives, one for OS, one for staff areas (300GB) and one for dept areas(300GB)

Space ran out so I added an extra 100GB to each drive in Vsphere and extended the volumes in Windows.

Once again, I need to add more space and wondered what the best way to do this is. Should I just add more space as I did, or create another disk and move some depts to that, or even add a second file server?

How large shouldl I go regarding vmdks?

Any advice would be great.

Thanks

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

whether to resize or create new virtual disks depends on your individual needs. Basically I think it's way easier to resize the existing virtual disks to avoid the need to split data and keep free disk space on 3 disks (i.e. wasting disk space). You can have virtual disks with up to ~2TB (2,032GB if you want to be able to use snapshots) provided you either use VMFS5 datastores or vmfs3 datastores with an 8MB block size.

With that said, you may also need to consider backup&restore. Depending on your SLA's you may need to have think of restore times, which will certainly grow with the disk sizes.

André

[treborextra]

Thanks for the advice Andre.