Continuing with the development of my virtual environment, I did some changes on the storage side of things.
The initial storage configuration was the following:
“Physical” hosts:
ESXi1 (ESXi 5.5)
- 1x 45GB (HDD) + 2x 10GB disks (HDD) + 2x 12.5GB disks (SSD)
ESXi2 (ESXi 5.5)
- 1x 45GB (HDD) + 2x 10GB disks (HDD) + 2x 12.5GB disks (SSD)
Centralized management server:
VCENTER01 (vCenter Server 5.5 + vCenter Converter 5.5) (Win Server 2K8 R2)
- 1x 40GB disk (HDD)
However it quickly became apparent that it was inadequate. After the installation of vCenter Server it had little free space to write logs. Not to mention, performance was poor for vCenter as it was using a traditional hard disk.
Similarly, there was little space on the datastores after the clones were created (for the swap files, snapshosts, etc.)
Finally there was one big problem: there was no shared storage entity that could be visible to all hosts!
To rectify the situation I began by resizing the virtual disks of the ESXi hosts and reducing their number.
I left the 10GB vmdks residing on HDDs unaltered, but for each ESXi node I deleted the two 12.5GB disks located on SSDs and created a single 30GB disk. Finally I added one large 200GB disk residing on HDD for storing miscellaneous files (connected to ESXi host #1):
I then expanded vCenter’s single disk to 55GB and moved it on an SSD.
This is how the new configuration looks like:
“Physical” hosts:
ESXi1 (ESXi 5.5)
- 1x 45GB (HDD) + 2x 10GB (HDD) + 1x 200GB (HDD) + 1x 30GB (SSD – OCZ RevoDrive 3)
ESXi2 (ESXi 5.5)
- 1x 45GB (HDD) + 2x 10GB (HDD) + 1x 30GB (SSD – OCZ RevoDrive 3)
Centralized management server:
VCENTER01 (vCenter Server 5.5 + vCenter Converter 5.5) (Win Server 2K8 R2)
- 1x 55GB disk (SSD – OCZ Agility 3)
And the corresponding datastores are as such:
All VMs currently reside on the SSD-based datastores, but I plan on spreading them on the HDD-based datastores as well, in order to see what differences there are in terms of disk performance.
For now I still don't have a shared datastore, but I'm working on it.