I am working on the initial storage design for a dual-server, ESXi-5 implementation. Storage will be hosted on a HP P4500 SAN (iSCSCI) with a total of 14 TB available (24 X 600GB, 15k drives). I will ultimately present 6 servers on two hosts (hosts are two, HP DL 380-G7). Of the 6 servers, three of them require SQL as as the data presentation backend. In my initial design, I wanted to start off by creating 4 LUNS, 2 as RAID-5 with three physical drives (LUNS A and B) and 2 as RAID-1+0 with four physical drives each (LUNS C and D) for a total of 1200 GB per LUN. On each LUN I wanted to create one VFMS (hosting one data-store) and then create multiple virtual disks in each VFMS, I wanted to use LUN-C to host the SQL data fies for each SQL VM machine (i.e. vm-sqlserver-1 would hook into LUN-C-virtual-disk-0, vm-sqlserver-2 would hook into LUN-C-virtual-disk-1). That way, I can leverage one volume/LUN for all SQL data files. I would host the OS files for the various VMs on seperate LUNS (i.e. LUN-A-virtual-disk-0 wold host the C: drive for vm-sqlserver-1).
Is this possible with iSCSI? Can I present one LUN to multiple machines and then have them each create a virtual disk in that VFMS?
I am planning on installing 2 X iSCSI-10GB/E HBAs in each server and use an HP 10-GBE network switch to connect the hosts to the SAN.
Thanks,
Greg