Design Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1 and NetApp or EMC Storage

Best Practices for VMware and Storage

1. The best flexibility comes from a combination of VMFS and NFS
2. Use NetApp or EMC vCenter plug-ins to automate your storage vendor best practices
3. Use Multiple NFS datastores and 10GbE ( 1GbE requires more complexity to address I/O scaling due to one data session per connection with NFSv3)
4. Avoid RDMs, use VMFS pools or NFS pools
5. Make the VMFS and NFS datastores big
6. Use SIOC if you have vSphere 4.1 or later ( Even if you do not use shares, it will ensure no VM swamps the others)

Exception:

1. Create planned datasore designs rather than having big pools for larger IO use cases. Oracle, Exchange, SAP etc.