Have you worked with any vmdks that are larger than 15TB? If a 16-24TB vmdk is going to cause issues then I would look for alternative design ideas. Right now I just want to make sure I build this server out in a way that's going to be stable and allow us to run backups consistently using Veeam. We can run an Azure File Sync server to improve performance if necessary. In the future we are looking at moving to Azure Files as a possible solution. I recently bricked an RS2414 by doing a firmware upgrade and the performance has not been very good either. While I do agree that I would love to offload a large portion of the data I am definitely not using a Synology. Some data needs to be kept indefinitely (engineering drawings, etc.). We are an AEC company and the company policy is to keep data for at least 7 years and we have some projects that have been active for over 20 years. If you're talking about a few hundred GB then yeah thick provisioning is no big deal, but when you're talking about several TB of unused space being consumed that's a different story. I have expanded multi-terrabyte vmdks in the past without any issues so I'm not concerned about performance from that aspect. We haven't seen any performance issues using thin provisioning. You and/or the OP are free to choose whatever disk type you like though, but the impact is not noticeable for most scenarios. It's about balance, but from an IO overhead and with a Nimble array this difference is unlikely to be an impact. On the flip side of this, using thin VMDKs does mean the person in charge of storage now needs to be a little more mindful of overallocation of the physical resources, but you reap the benefits of thin disks, such as space reclamation (UNMAP) and TRIM to give back unused space to all pools. The difference has been negligible for such a long time now, and unless the system is pushing something like 1M IOPS this wont be an huge impact.īy using thick disks you pre-allocate all of the space (used or unused) - from a SAN perspective this gives an overview of what's physically left, but from another perspective, space is used for the sake of being used, even when data is not allocating all of it. Then always recommended to use 1 vHDD per partition if you need a larger HDD, all you need to do is increase size of the vHDD and expand it in the OS. There are many cases where people only have 10GB on the storage and they use thin-disk on 2 or more VMs each having 8TB (as example) then when users actually use 8TB on one VM, all the VMs hang as the ESXi data store ran out of storage.ģ. If you want to "display" 10TB to your users, they will think there is 10TB available for use & likely use it. There is a performance overhead if storage usage changes (VMDK resizes, imagine resizing a 1TB file or in your case a 10TB or 16TB file) ![]() No backup) else department shares are on Google Drive (else OneDrive if you have O365). The rest of the lesser critical files are stored on a Synology 620 Slim (RAID 5x 6x SSDs. I have 15,000 staff and our "Critical file server" is approx 1TB in size, including 80GB for Server 2019 Std. ![]() What are you storing that need such large and expensive storage (SAN vs NAS). There are always different schools of thought.ġ. I always do thin disks and use a separate drive for the OS. 2019 is just because I already built a few file server VMs before 2022 was out and just want to keep them all the same. We've also had issues with DFS in the past so I'd like to avoid it if possible. ![]() We would have to split it up and it would get messy. We can't really use DFS because the bulk of the data is in one folder. Are there really issues with using dynamic disks? I would keep the VMDKs together in the same datastore/LUN. I like the idea of using smaller VMDK files and using Dynamic Disks in the OS, but I have read that some people recommend to avoid that. We are running ESX 7.0 and use Veeam for backup. The guest OS will be Windows Server 2019 and it will be hosted on a Nimble SAN. Is there a better way to handle a VM of this size or larger (spanned vmdk files via dynamic disks, RDM, iscsi in the VM, etc.)? Is it acceptable to create a single 16TB VMDK? I love the simplicity of a single VMDK file, but if it's going to cause issues then I can look at other configurations. We have a need to create a virtual machine for a large file server.
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