Greeting to the community!
I'm relatively new to ESXi, and am planning a deployment for my home office, largely to support my software development activities (both professional and hobby projects). I've been doing a fair bit of reading online, in an attempt to plan my deployment of ESXi 5.1 (free), and have come to realize that planning storage is a very vast and complex topic. Though I believe my situation to be relatively simple due to small scale, I thought it would be a good idea to seek some guidance and verification from the community.
The Scenario:
I'm planning to deploye ESXi 5.1 to a Dell PowerEdge 2950 Series II server. It has 2 x QC 2.2 GHz Xeon CPUs, 16 GB RAM, and 6 x 1TB SATA HDDs connected to a PERC6/i RAID controller.
I'm planning to host (at least) the following VMs:
- A Domain Controller (Win 2012 x64, or possibly Windows Server 2012 Essentials)
- A Daabase Server (SQL Server 2012)
- A Web Server (IIS)
- A TFS Server (TFS 2012 Express)
- 4-6 additional Win 8 Pro VMs for miscellaneous uses
The Questions:
- I'd like to install ESXi on a SanDisk USB flash drive, so that all my HDDs are available for local storage. I know that this is both possible, and supported, however are there any particular "need-to-knows" or "gotchas" that I need to watch-out for? E.g. are there any special considerations with respect to the scratch partition? Flash drive size recommendations?
- I'd like to configure my disks with 4x1TB in a RAID 10 array, and 1 hot spare. I understand that a limitation of the PERC controllers is that RAID 10 arrays cannot be segmented into multiple LUNs (or virtual disks - to use the PERC nomenclature). Am I limiting myself by having just a single LUN with 2TB of storage for what would essentially be my only VMFS datastore? To create an array that presents multiple LUNs, I'ld have to go with a RAID 5 or 6 array, an that substantially reduces write performance - so I'm reluctant to do that unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
- If I stick with the RAID 10 + 1 hot spare from 2 (above), what is a practical use for the sixth 1TB drive? Scratch partition? VM paging? ISO storage? Create 1 LUN or multiple LUNs? Forogore the flash drive, and isntall ESXi on it? Given that there would be no redundancy/fault tolerance for this dirve, I'm not sure of a practical use for it.
In the end, I'm really the only user for this environment (at least for the foreseeable future). So, simplicity is probably a higher priority over performance (even though the techie in me wants all the performance I can get). E.g. though it would be a SQL Server best practice to allow that VM direct access to disk(s) via RDM - I think I can probably get away without it since I'm really the only user generating any load on the system.
Thanks to the community in-advance for your guidance an support!
Dave