Sharing storage between separate vsphere clusters

blargoe

Anyone know for sure whether or not it is safe to have several HA clusters defined, but have them all share the same LUNs among them for VM storage?

HeroPsycho

It's safe but be aware that it can degrade performance of the datastore as more hosts are able to access it. This is beyond just aggregate disk workloads of the VMs.

RTmarc

blargoe wrote: »

Anyone know for sure whether or not it is safe to have several HA clusters defined, but have them all share the same LUNs among them for VM storage?

Why multiple HA clusters accessing same datastores?

HeroPsycho

RTmarc wrote: »

Why multiple HA clusters accessing same datastores?

Ease of management and storage might be one reason, but it's still a good point. Separating workloads onto various spindles by at least disk i/o characteristics is good, and even better to separate them by application. But that could all be done while doing what Blargoe is talking about theoretically.

blargoe

HeroPsycho wrote: »

Ease of management and storage might be one reason, but it's still a good point. Separating workloads onto various spindles by at least disk i/o characteristics is good, and even better to separate them by application. But that could all be done while doing what Blargoe is talking about theoretically.

We are going to be virtualizing our Citrix servers soon, and they are serving one application that is not very disk intensive. We'll have probably 6-8 XenApp servers and a Provisioning server. I'm looking into isolating Citrix onto a couple of our smaller footprint hosts loaded up with memory and CPU, but we are constrained on our SAN at this time and would like to avoid dedicating a bunch of spindles to just this application if it's not going to hurt us to do so.