I’ve got a couple of questions regarding storage provisioning for our VMware environment.
Our datastores are currently presented from a pair of Dell-EMC Unity 450F all-flash arrays (50TB each), using mostly 3TB iSCSI LUNs. Average VM size is around 200GB, but there is a wide range VM sizes, from sub 10gb micro-Linux OSs, to a few 4+ TB VMs, which reside on single VM datastores (above the standard 3TB LUN size). We have around 340 VMs across 20 datastores, with an average of around 17 VMs per datastore, but this is a little skewered by some of the single-VM LUNs, with most datastores hosting 20+ VMs. From the Unity end, all LUNs are thin provisioned, with half of the LUNs enabled for data-reduction, and a half-hearted effort on our end to match VMs and workloads suitable for data reduction on appropriate LUNs, and vice versa. The VMware environment itself is all 6.5, with Enterprise Plus ESXi licencing.
My four questions are as follows:
- Our datastores are starting to fill, and I need to present more storage from the Unity array. Should I be looking to extend the existing datastores, or is 3TB and 20VMs per datastore a nice size to standardise on (outside of the larger datastores for single VMs)?
- There is a lot of good information out there on data reduction, however am I worrying too much about this, and should just enable this for all datastores?
- How much, if at all, should I think about matching workloads (OS, application type, etc.) to certain datastores?
- Finally, is block iSCSI best for this environemnt, or should I be looking at NFS or even VVols?
Thanks in advance for any assistance with these queries!