ESX (Vsphere4)

[D1rkG3ntly]

All,

I'm doing my first ESX server installation. Single HP server. 4x300gb drives set up in a RAID5 array by default. Here's my question:

I know with ESXi it often comes shipped as a firmware install from some vendors because of the small footprint. This is good because the hypervisor stuff doesn't need to take up disk space (which can be used for the images).

With the ESX configuration, I'm wondering how to approach the install with regards to the actual location of the ESX install on the disks. Should I create a separate small disk striped across all 5 for the ESX, leaving the rest for images? Or should I just install it to the current logical disk and have the images in a folder. IOW, I'm curious about the best practices regarding separating the ESX files from the images themselves. Not sure if I'm making sense here. :-)

Thanks in advance for any input.

DH

[D1rkG3ntly]

Actually, I came up with a solution. Going to get a couple of smaller drives, RAID 1 them, and then RAID 10 the rest for the images. :-)

All,

I'm doing my first ESX server installation. Single HP server. 4x300gb drives set up in a RAID5 array by default. Here's my question:

I know with ESXi it often comes shipped as a firmware install from some vendors because of the small footprint. This is good because the hypervisor stuff doesn't need to take up disk space (which can be used for the images).

With the ESX configuration, I'm wondering how to approach the install with regards to the actual location of the ESX install on the disks. Should I create a separate small disk striped across all 5 for the ESX, leaving the rest for images? Or should I just install it to the current logical disk and have the images in a folder. IOW, I'm curious about the best practices regarding separating the ESX files from the images themselves. Not sure if I'm making sense here. :-)

Thanks in advance for any input.

DH

[VaKo]

I like running it on a USB stick (the Dell 2950's and 1950s I am using have an internal USB port which was designed for this purpose, when ESXi comes as firmware it will be running from either an internal usb or an internal SD card) and just using the HDD's for VMFS or use iSCSI/FC for remote storage (openfiler works very well for iSCSI and has proper support). ESXi itself has very small I/O requirements so there is nothing performance wise that will prevent it from sharing the same array as the datastore.

I am still at a loss as to what I would want full ESX for tbh.