Default storage pool configuration for VNX 5300

No – the vault drives cannot be used in a pool due to different free capacity

I assume you meant block pool and not file pool (AVM)

Rainer_EMC, yes, I meant block storage pool or traditional RAID group. So these drives are completeley unusable in terms of block storage array and during solution sizing procedures we shouldn't take them into account? I will really appreceate if you provide links to documentation that contains information related to this question. Thank you!

You can use the remainder of these drive with traditional raidgroups

You just cannot use them to add to a block pool – a block pool needs complete disks

boot LUNs for ESX servers should be just fine, everything gets loaded into ESX memory so there is very little I/O.

Rainer_EMC, thank you for the information! In case if I want to use these drives I will create Traditional RAID Group RAID5 (4+1) with adding one additional drive.

dynamox, I just want to create LUNs for operating systems of virtualization servers (Boot from SAN).

do not put anything very i/o intensive on those LUNs, might impact array's overall performance.

Actually I'm planing to use Windows Server 2008 R2 with a Hyper-V role. But I don't think that there is any significant difference in I/O behaviour of these two systems.

so you were planning on putting the root partition on these LUNs and child partitions would reside in the pool ? I remember there used to be a white paper that helps with Hyper-V and VNX architecture, i can't find it now.

Maybe I read technical documentation/white papers not very carefully but I didn't find this information.

In the DOCUMENTS section of this forum, look for "EMC Unified Storage Best Practices for Performance and Availability - Common Platform and Block Storage 31.5 — Applied Best Practices.pdf" - in that document, see page 43 - the section called "DAE OS" - this explains about the limitations when using the OS drives (the first four disks).

glen

glen, thank you for the mention of this document. There is also very important information regarding this topic in "System drive" section (page 64). It's a little bit confusing bacause this document contains information about Block OE 05.31 (this isn't latest version).

dynamox, yes, I'm planning to put all VMs and their data to separate Storage Pools/LUNs. Thank you for information. It will be great if you find a link to this document.

glen, I didn't find newer version of this document (probably it's not exist). At this moment everything is pretty clear for me. Thank you!