This session was a bit higher level and more common sense tips, so I split after 30 minutes and went to another session. The speakers had 8 best practice tips, and both of them were from Dell/Compellent. So they had a few minutes sales pitch before they started the meat of the session. Highlights included:
- Select an array built for virtualization
- Dynamic storage with wide striping
- Ability to change RAID levels on the fly, extend LUNs
- Rely on metadata to intelligently manage storage
- Let tiered storage do the heavy lifting
- Sub-LUN data tiering
- vSphere 5.0 storage DRS is not sub-LUN tiering aware so it may not behave as expected when measuring latency
- Use thin provisioning on the array and with VMDKs
- I would actually disagree here and say use array-based thin provisioning and EZT VMDKs if your array supports VAAI, zero detect and thin provisioning.
- Leverage storage snapshots
- Protect your data
- Deploy new VMs (who would really do this?) by cloning a LUN then running sysprep on the cloned VMs. Really?!?
After those four I lost interest and ran over to another session….SRM 5.0 What’s New.
