Large ESXi 5.5 File server

Reektan

Reektan

Reektan

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Anybody got any reasonably large file servers out there running on ESXi? Current one is 2.5TB but it's about to jump to 8TB. There is no room on the current SAN which runs the more 'expensive' resource VM's that need high IOPS so I was going to look into introducing another DL380 host with ESXi 5.5 and a good lot of local disks to give a 10-12TB RAID5/6 volume. Then deploy this as a VM Win 2008/2012 fileserver (primarily as Veeam backups have been great for me and it would be great for Veeam to back this up too).

I read a few things online how yes, 5.5 support '64tb' vmdk's but people don't recommend it etc. Is a 8-12tb vmdk pushing it? It's going to have a local NAS backup and offsite all with Veeam.

Curious how others handle this using a VM environment.

In my old place I'd have dished out a bunch more LUNS' but the budgets are much smaller with what I'm doing right now.
 
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You could simply split it up into multiple VMDKs or is there an actual file that's going to take up all of the space?



M.
 
People don't like single large drives as they're a pain to work with, whenever possible its generally considered best practice to split your data onto more smaller drives; you get plenty of benefits such as check disks, maintenance etc... all becomes easier on smaller drives and you generally get better performance with more vmdks split over more luns for increased queues however this isn't always possible.

8TB I personally wouldn't be too worried about it depending on what its to be used for but don't go raid 5 with large sata spindles; Raid 6.
 
I've been reading about the multi VMDK just now. This might be what I'll go for as I guess you can have windows see it as one large drive. You just extend the first partition into the drives. It might be a little difficult managing multiple individual mounted drives to 2tb drives - although with management it could be doable.

Yeah RAID 6 was the idea - appreciate the responses for sure.

Veeam would be ok with both I think too.
 
I'd echo ecksmen's comments. Keep your drives smaller and save yourself a headache.
Unless you have single files that are gigantic, I would split the data across drives.

Without knowing how you have your data and shares structured it's hard to give anything but general advice, but from my own experience:

>If you use ABE, use DFS - I had a bug with ABE that caused CPU usage on our fileserver to hit 100%. continuously. MS took 6+ months on a paid support call and failed to fix it and ended up giving us our money back.
Using DFS works around this bug.

> Use DFS anyway - it'll give you the opportunity to present shares from different servers as if they are a single share. This might even be an easier way of achieving your goal.

> Use 2012 if you can. I haven't confirmed for myself, but it apparently includes dedup. You might be surprised how much space this could save you.
 
How much can you get the cheapest EMC DataDomain for? I am pretty anti Windows file servers these days. They are such a lot of hassle when there are purpose-built appliances that work extremely well.
 
I'm finding that purpose-built appliances are more trouble then they are worth at the moment.

SAN's should stick to do what they do well and provide storage and not trying to manage your work follow.

If you are taking about adding an extra servers with local disks does the data not need to be available if that server was to fail?
 
rotor said:
How much can you get the cheapest EMC DataDomain for? I am pretty anti Windows file servers these days. They are such a lot of hassle when there are purpose-built appliances that work extremely well.
Click to expand...

Smallest DataDomain is less than $10,000 now.
 
Daft question, but how much to increase the storage on the current SAN? Would it not be better in the long term?
 
Lots of mixing of terminology here.

SAN storage is dumb. It provides raw LUNs, which you have to put something in front of that provides the service you want. This can be a Windows server (running a file, print or SQL Server), an ESXi host (running all kinds of VMs), a Linux server, etc. This front-end can also be a hardware appliance, like a NAS.

However, SAN storage is very expensive, and file servers do not require high performance. Dedicated Filer/NAS devices generally are cheap (compared to SAN), and are tailored for the specific job of being file servers, which they do really well. This is where the dedicated NAS/Filers come in handy.

I have used Hitachi HCAP and HNAS, EMC Celerra (hooked up to EMC VMAX arrays), and EMC DataDomain. They all have pros and cons, but the one thing they have in common is that they are truly set and forget. These things are rock-solid, and never cause any problems.

I'm a big fan of using things that are fit for purpose, and I used to be quite skeptical of dedicated NAS devices, but because my experience with these various brands/models has been so universally good, I have completely changed my mind about them.
 
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