Large ESXi 5.5 File server

[Reektan]

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.

 

[Reektan]

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.