What disk setup is needed / best practice for hypervisor-only servers?

Posted by Luke404 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Luke404
Published on 2013-11-07T15:43:12Z Indexed on 2013/11/07 15:56 UTC
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Filed under:

virtualization

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vmware-esxi

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storage

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xenserver

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capacity-planning

Planning to buy some servers to run an hypervisor (Citrix XenServer or VMware vSphere, still have to decide between the two) we'd like to boot off the local redundant SD card module offered by various vendors (eg. Dell, HP, etc...). The actual VMs will run from an existing iSCSI SAN (which, by the way, can't support booting the servers directly off the SAN).

What are the reasons, if any, to choose completely diskless servers VS having some local storage? And what would be the guidelines to choose that local storage? (number of spindles, raid level, etc)

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