Storage Groups and Vmware Clusters

Question

I will start by apologizing because this question has been asked before but I am unclear of the actual correct answer. I am also knew to EMC administration :-)

So I have a VNX5400 and I am going to have 8 ESXi servers connected to the SAN in a cluster. I opened a case but was not given a real clear answer other then I think I remember. Well I want to make sure I am setting things up correctly the first time and not have to redo things later when the system is in production.

Our ESXI servers will boot from Local Mirrored SD cards

Example 1:

Host 1

Storage Group A

Shared LUN 1

Shared LUN 2

Shared LUN 3

Host 2

Storage Group B

Shared LUN 1

Shared LUN 2

Shared LUN 3

Example 2:

Boot from Local SD cards.

All Hosts can share All LUNs

Host 1 and Host 2

Storage Group ALL

Shared LUN 1

Shared LUN 2

Shared LUN 3

So is Example 1 or Example 2 the recommends way?

Thanks for your help,

Gary

dynamox · Accepted Answer

if you are going to boot from SAN and you only have one set of HBAs then you would do example 1. Where each server has its own storage group where first LUN is the boot LUN for that specific host and the rest of the LUNs are shared between other hosts.

If you are booting from local disk/storage then Example 2 is the easiest one to manage, you simply create one storage group, add all clusters members to it and then add shared LUNs.

bonetsm · Answer

Since you are booting from local mirrored SD cards, example 2 is the recommended configuration.

RoadKing2413 · Answer

In order to take advantage of the clustering features in vCenter like vMotion or Storage vMotion, you must have shared storage visible to all ESXi hosts. So as you have given the example, option 2 is your best choice.

Also - you must ensure that all switch zoning is correct so that there are redundant paths to each ESXi host.

Gary_P1 · Answer

Thanks everybody for the responses they were very helpful.

VNX

Storage Groups and Vmware Clusters

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