Recommended configuration for ESXi

[tom__w]

I am a bit of a newbie even though I have been using FreeNAS and VMWare for over 5 years. My original configuration was to create one dataset for all of my VMs. I broke that dataset into two iscsi targets and now run 7 VMs, distributed amongst the targets.

I am finally setting up a new FreeNAS machine with lots of storage, some SSDs, 10 Gig NICS, etc.

What is best practice for the datasets? Should I create one per VM, giving me the ability to roll back individual machines (via snapshot)?

Or is there another best practice?

Thanks in advance.

 

[bigphil]

For that few number of VM's, I'd just create one iSCSI target (it also depends on how much space you need for the vm's...if an individual vm needs a few TB in disk space, I might split that off but not necessary). If you need to restore a vm, you can setup a scheduled snapshot task (enable vm sync snapshot in FreeNAS too) and clone one of the snapshots and mount it to your ESXi host as another datastore. You could then move the vm files back to your production datastore via sVmotion or copy them manually and then remove the datastore and destroy the clone. Just remember that snapshots are not backups. To be safe, you'll need to replicate your FreeNAS data to another location.

 

[tom__w]

For that few number of VM's, I'd just create one iSCSI target (it also depends on how much space you need for the vm's...if an individual vm needs a few TB in disk space, I might split that off but not necessary). If you need to restore a vm, you can setup a scheduled snapshot task (enable vm sync snapshot in FreeNAS too) and clone one of the snapshots and mount it to your ESXi host as another datastore. You could then move the vm files back to your production datastore via sVmotion or copy them manually and then remove the datastore and destroy the clone. Just remember that snapshots are not backups. To be safe, you'll need to replicate your FreeNAS data to another location.

* By one ISCSI target you are implying one dataset in FreeNAS?
* I am curious why that would be better / easier than multiple datasets / targets, especially if you have to roll back to a snapshot? Is it because you can increase the size of the VM drives (if needed) more easily?
* I have installed the free Veeam tool for moving VMs from place to place. I presume that works like sVmotion

 

[bigphil]

*It would be one zvol per target. You could create the zvols in the same FreeNAS dataset
*How often are you planning on needing to roll back a storage snapshot? It shouldn't be something you'd need to do often. You could create VMware machine snapshots with a task on the host or by using VMware PowerCLI. That will offer the quickest way to restore if you plan on needing that ability very quickly. Ultimately its up to you. For such a small environment it could certainly work just fine by having multiple targets instead of one.
*Yes, the Veeam Quick Migration is similar to native sVmotion.