Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Upgrading Home ESX host to SCSI

Curently I am upgrading my ESX host from SATA to SCSI. I am doing this for the following reasons:

  • ESXi will not recogonize SATA as RAID array.
  • While SATA is cheap, I have noticed that running 4 or 5 VM's concurrently on the same datastore that is comprised of 1 disk it will tax the datastore where I can see delays in the guest systems.
  • Noticing heavy background disk access that does not show up on the Performance Graphs for the disk. Essentally it is useless busy disk time.
  • I have this cool IBM ServeRAID 6M card I want to give a try with some SCSI disks

Now my current ESX host has a 73GB SCSI drive that is used for the boot of the ESXi OS and to store the ISO's and a 500GB sata for the storage of the Guest VMs. I plan to replace it with a 6 disk 73GB RAID 5 SCSI array and see how it performs.

Currently I have only half of the disks, and awaiting the purchase of the remaining ones from ebay to complete my conversion.