Книга: Mastering VMware® Infrastructure3

Storage Management Best Practices

Storage Management Best Practices

The configuration details regarding the virtual networking best practices shown here can be found in Chapter 4.

? When booting from SAN, mask each bootable LUN to be seen only by the ESX Server booting from that LUN.

? Build a dedicated and isolated storage network for iSCSI SAN storage to isolate and secure iSCSI storage-related traffic.

? Build a dedicated and isolated storage network for NAS/NFS storage to isolate and secure NAS/NFS storage-related traffic.

? Perform all masking at the storage device, not at the ESX Server host.

? Separate disk-intensive virtual machines on different LUNs carved from separate physical disks.

? Provide individual zoning configurations for each ESX Server host.

? Allow the SAN administrators to manage LUN sizes. VMFS extents might help immediate needs, but might lead to loss of data in the event that an extent becomes corrupted or damaged.

? Spread the storage communication workload across the available hardware devices. For example, if the ESX Server host has two fibre channel adapters, ensure that the VMkernel is not sending all traffic through one adapter while the other remains dormant.

? Use separate storage locations for test virtual machines and production virtual machines.

? Build LUNs in sizes that are easy to manage yet can host multiple virtual machines. For example create 300GB or 400GB LUNs to host 5 or 6 virtual machines. Be prepared to use storage VMotion to move disk intensive virtual machines.

? Use storage VMotion to eliminate down time when needing to migrate a virtual machine between datastores.

? Use Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) for Microsoft Clustering scenarios or to provide virtual machines with access to existing LUNs that contain data on NTFS formatted storage.

? Implement a solid change management practice for the deployment of new LUNs.Identify a standard sized LUN and stray from the standard only when the situation calls for it.

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