I am trying to spec out a server machine to run VMWare ESX/ESXi to host about 3-4 VM's. They will likely be hosting VM's running IIS, Apache and BIND. We don't have a huge budget for this and to a certain degree this is an experiment in virtualization. If it works, we will apply this solution to the rest of our data center.
I am concerned about performance when using RAID technology across VM's on the same box. Does anyone have any advice/experiences they can share either in favor of RAID or opposed to it with multiple VM's (Hopefully we can avoid a general anti/pro-RAID argument). If your experience results in recommending against RAID in this case, how do you handle redundancy/availability? Thanks!
Best Answer
Given your application profile (i.e. doesn't sound like it's going to be doing too much writing) I'd say you'll be just fine with R6. Oh and worry more about how many VMs you store in a single datastore/LUN (keep to less than 4 for decent performance) than how many VMs are managed by the array.