ME4 and very large volumes

Question

Just wondering what other people's experience is with very large volumes on an ME4 is and how you have it configured.

We have a single ME4012 with 12TB disks in iSCSI and the purpose of this unit is bulk video storage.

We run VMware with Windows Server 2019 virtual machines.

Due to the 62TB constraints of vSphere, we've chosen to raw mount the volume directly to the virtual operating system which will give us a 94TB volume. We used to do this with far smaller volumes on Equallogic years ago without problem. We'll be formatting REFS.

Comments? Good, bad, ugly, we are crazy.
I haven't found a lot of advice when dealing with volumes of this size.

DELL-Sam L · Answer

Hello Damien Calvert,

Based on your current setup you are going to want to use Linear storage configuration. With having 12tb drives it would be best to have smaller volumes rather than one large volume. With having a single volume of 96TB you will most likely have some performance impact.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Damien Calvert · Answer

Hi Sam,

Why Linear instead of Virtual?

RE your comment about smaller volumes, are you referring at the operating system level or SAN?
What performance impact are you suggesting there might be with a single volume and why?

Thanks

Damien

PowerVault

ME4 and very large volumes

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