Hi All,
I'm new to VSphere ESXi & I'd like to get some advice on the best disk configuration for ESXi running 3-4 VM's.
I have a fairly beefy server onto which I want to put ESXi, and the following separate VM's: Windows SBS 2008 Standard, Windows Server 2008 & SQL Server 2008, Winddows Server 2008 Terminal Server, and possibly one other Windows Server 2008 machine. The system supports up to 6 SATA-2 drives in RAID 0,1,5,10 configurations. There are obviously many different ways of configuring the drives, but I'd like a setup that gives me some security should a drive fail, and also gets the best performance out of the hardware.
The possible configurations that I've thought of are:
1. Mirrored drives for ESXi and a separate drive for each VM.
2. Mirrored drives for ESXi and a all VM's on a 3 Disk RAID-5 array plus a hot spare.
3. Mirrored drives for ESXi and a all VM's on a 4 Disk RAID-10 array.
4. Single 4 or 5 Disk RAID-10 array for ESXi and all VM's plus a hot spare.
Any thoughts/advice would be welcome..
Andrew
