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Chapter 3 Installing and Configuring ESX Server on Blade Servers
Local SCSI
Some blade systems have SCSI peripherals that can be attached to each CPU, and take
up to two SCSI drives. In typical use, these SCSI drives are placed into a RAID1
(mirrored) configuration for redundancy.
On an IBM blade with SCSI peripherals, the SCSI peripheral takes up one of the blade
slots, thus reducing the maximum blade density by half.
SAN Storage
Fibre Channel SANs are the preferred storage media for ESX Server and VirtualCenter
in a blade environment, due to the following advantages:
! This configuration doubles the blade density per blade chassis, compared with
local SCSI storage on IBM blades.
! SAN storage may be shared among multiple blades (and other systems), thus
allowing storage consolidation. Often, this is a much more efficient use of storage
resources than dedicated, per-system, RAID-protected storage.
! IBM blade systems support redundant host bus adapters (HBAs) to meet High
Availability needs.
! The storage is more reliable (RAID5 with hot spares compared to RAID1).
! Storage is unlimited compared to the storage that fits on a single local SCSI disk.
! A shared SAN is required for using VMotion with VirtualCenter.
! Images, templates, and so on may be shared between multiple ESX Server systems.
Typical IBM BladeCenter Storage Configuration
A typical IBM BladeCenter implementation of ESX Server and VirtualCenter has a
single IDE drive (20GB, 40GB, or larger) on each blade and at least several hundred
gigabytes of SAN storage split into RAID5 LUNs, visible to all members of each
VirtualCenter farm.
Install the VMkernel, the service console, and the virtual machine configuration (.vmdk)
files on a local drive. Typically, this is the local IDE drive on each blade. However, if
your BladeCenter includes a local SCSI peripheral, then we suggest you install the
VMkernel, the service console, and the virtual machine configuration (.vmdk) files on
the local SCSI drive.
You can then install the virtual disk (.vmdk) files on LUNs in your Storage Area
Network devices. VMFS volumes cannot reside on an IDE drive.
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