you know what everybody will say .."it depends"

can you give some info like OS , volume manager , application, replication requirements ..etc

A bit hard to give characteristics as we have all kinds of flavours.

A big one would be VMware ESX 3.5 that stores all its VMs on the SAN.
Other than that Windows file servers that store users data.
Another thing I expect to pop up soon is SQL database storage.

Definitely concentrating on ESX now

cheers

look for this white paper "White Paper: CLARiiON Integration with VMware ESX Server - Applied Technology"

also take a look at one particular thread called "Striped metaluns and performance" ...you are going to find a very good discussion there.

Thanks, Will have a look at that

Remember that ESX has a VMFS limit of 2TB and that is 2047GB. If you try to create a 2TB one, it's invisible for ESX (I tried that).
Furthermore consider using RDM (Raw Device Mappings), so a VM get's a true Clariion LUN and not just a piece of a larger VMFS. For performance reasons you should consider spreading the load accross as many physical spindels as possible, however: larger RAID Groups have considerably longer "repair" times if a hot spare is invoked, since more disks need to be read to rebuild the missing data. Consider using METALUN's with RG's of 5 spindels (4+1). Each RG has it's own HS and rebuild times will be fair. If performance is not a big issue, use RAID5 (8+1), but remember that rebuild times will be longer.

You can (I'm 96.3 percent certain about that), but I'm not sure if you can move to RDM.
The source can be RDM, but the target is unsure.

Rob,

do you know if you can do storage vmotion with RDM devices ?

Also, please review these documents as well - The Best Practice for Fibre Channel Storage - see the section called "Sizing the Storage Requirements"


EMC CLARiiON Best Practices for Fibre Channel Storage: FLARE Release 26 Firmware Update - Best Practices Planning

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/H2358_clariion_best_prac_fibre_chnl_wp_ldv.pdf

EMC CLARiiON Fibre Channel Storage Fundamentals - Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/H1049_emc_clariion_fibre_channel_storage_fundamentals_ldv.pdf

regards,

glen kelley

we use max size of 100GB in HP-UX and Linux .. But there are some with 500GB LUNs used in ESX environment.

those were choosed considering a lot performance reasons.

Looks like a max. of 500Gb is the way to go for ESX, I am getting the same message from the VMware community. Thanks every one for their advice.

I'll be back