Hi All,
I am hoping you can help me, or advise me in some way please
What I have
3 hosts connecting to a Windows Storage Server 2012 box
Around 50 VMs
The Question
Each host connects to the Windows Storage Server 2012, using either NFS or iSCSI
At the moment I have an NFS share which holds clones of the above 50 VMs, these clones are powered off and not important (as only temporary), and this NFS volume has deduplication enabled in WSS and I have seen quite significant storage savings
BUT I am looking to setup an iSCSI virtual disk on the WSS box which these hosts will see
This target will be used as a datastore for live VMs, which are primarily web servers
If it advisable to enable deduplication on WSS Volumes that contain iSCSI virtual disks?
I have read in places regarding NetApp, but not so much on WSS with vmware iSCSI
For those who arent familiar with WSS (and I am just getting started myself)
You create a Storage Pool (you collection of physical disks) (20TB in this example)
You then create a virtual disk - this can be of any size regardless of the Storage Pool size (due to thin provisioning here) (6tb in this example)
You then create a volume which is in this virtual disk (so we allocate the full virtual disk, so volume is 6tb in this example)
Within this volume I then create my iSCSI virtual disks (in this example they are 1TB each)
So I have 3 1TB iSCSI virtual disks in this volume, and it is the volumes in which you enable deduplication, so it would 'dedupe' everything in it
Storage Pool
Virtual Disk
Volume
iSCSI VD 1
iSCSI VD 2
iSCSI VD 3
Hope the above isnt to messy, and thanks for any help
Cheers
Sam