Mike D’s Blog

I get stopped a lot at conferences and events and asked about storage layouts. I’m not sure why that is but there’s one common thread I’ve seen through all of these conversations – people really try and overcomplicate things. Usually someone is trying to over engineer a solution because that’s what you had to do in the physical world. Well, actually you didn’t need to do it in the physical world but for some reason every person I talk to thinks that their account has the biggest, meanest apps that require all of this complicated tuning in order to make run. Truth be told I’ve run into very few of those types of apps.

To make a long story short I ran across a post by Chad Sakac recently on dispelling some of the myths around VMFS. Stuff like number of VMs per volume, size of volume, and the biggest one – whether or not to use NFS. Chad goes into some great detail on all of these points and more. His most recent blog post is definitely worth a read. Actually his whole blog is worth a read but for this post I really want you to go and read the VMFS information to build your knowledgebase. I think you’ll find that keeping it simple and going with a lot of defaults makes things perform and scale well.

Go read Chad’s full post here.