Design Help EV 9 SP2 Virtualised

[Kieren]

Hello,

This is my first post in this Forum, so thank you for any information given in advance.

Our system is going to be virtualised using ESXi and all data is going to be held on a SAN.

The dilemma I am facing is what disks to use for the Indexing disks on the Mailbox, Journal and File system EV servers.

First what speed do you recommend - Fibre channel 15K or 10K?

What RAID are you using - Raid 1 or Raid 5?

Thanks again

Kieren

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Faster is better, always, unless your backup processes are suspect/not fast in which case you will probably want a RAID5 i suppose, but bigger and faster is usually what you'd always gun for

[SGF]

You have to calculate the disk speed and RAID configuration based on the I/O requirement. The RAID5 has additional I/O overhead for parity calculations and also your disks will slow down to a considerable extend in case of a RAID5 rebuild.

Also, you have to keep in mind that VMWare vMotion in still not offcially supported by Symantec even in V9 SP2. EV performance with vMotion has been inconsistent. It works for many without any issues, but for some, the EV services fails during vMotion.

I would advice you to test it properly before going ahead in production.

[Kieren]

Thank you for you last post.

Out of interest do you use EV on VMWare?

If so what is your configuration?

Thanks again

Kieren

[Kieren]

According to the new EV Compatibility Chart EV 9.0 is compatible wirth ESXi 4.1.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH38537 

Are you talking from personal experience?

[Marco_Randall]

I am currently using EV in a ESX environment not ESXi, however there is no different as they are both hypervisors, one just doesn't have a service console.  What is the size of your environment?  I would definitly go with the 15K FC, as you will probably find out disk IOPS are your best friend in virtualization.  I'm not understanding the RAID question, RAID should be configured on the storage device by the storage architect, are you architecting your own storage as well?  I think you would be wasting your time configuring RAID inside the vm when it could be done at the SAN. I haven't seen any issues migrating our servers around the environment.  As far as vMotioning would go I wouldn't worry about it, just let your virtual EV sit still and move other machines if you're talking DRS, and as far as host fault toleranace goes HA will restart your machine on a different host in the event of a failure.