small SSD and thin provisioning

How many VMs can I fit on one 64gb SSD with thin provisioning in vmware? I want to put 2 nested esxi hosts and 3 VMs on top of that. Also supporting the esxi hosts, a DC and vcenter (probably windows server 2012). How much of that will fit? If it matters, I'm running this all on esxi as the host OS.

I can get a 256gb SSD if I need to, but would rather not spend the money unless really needed.

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Comments

Cable_guy

Windows or Linux VM's? That depends... Linux may be around 1GB depending on the distro, but W2K8 can reach 20GB.

ESXi 5.5 vCenter appliance is like ~3GB IIRC

iBrokeIT

Better off getting a drive that will give you room to experiment. 64 GB is not enough for lab unless you are only using Server 2003 VM's. 256 GB would be preferable and you plenty of room.

Also, this is just a lab. You don't HAVE TO use SSDs. You can easily get away with using spindle disks unless you are really planning on doing something with intensive IO.

ehnde

I'm looking towards SSDs because the nested VMs are horrendously slow. Maybe I have less tolerance for slowness...I'm not sure if this is a matter of perception or what. I trashed my setup and am rebuilding the virtual environment because it was so frustrating.

I've also been experimenting with iSCSI, but have since then realized I had misconfigured it (no dedicated storage vlan causing huge I/O latency spikes). The SSD would be much simpler

So a thin provisioned Windows Server 2012 would take up about 20G? I'll try it tonight and see

....I'm just going to buy the drive. That greatly simplifies everything and will let me focus on the exam objectives.

gc8dc95

Ya I did a little checking. Your server VM's will run 19-20Gb, this includes a few extras installed. I would get a 256gb SSD for sure. It goes a lot faster than you think. I have a 512Gb and it is filling up quick, even thin provisioned.

jibbajabba

One 64GB VM, 64 1GB VMs, 128 500MB VMs

It really depends what sort of VMs they are and thin provisioning isn't really a tool to make smaller disks last longer. With guest patching etc. Your VMs will grow and depending on how far you over provisioned your disk you quickly end up in a situation where you run out of disk space, not even having enough room to power VMs on.

You can start with 64GB but get a bigger one at 80% utilisation and re-use your smaller SD for host caching, nested host / vSan labbing and so on.

ehnde

jibbajabba wrote: »

thin provisioning isn't really a tool to make smaller disks last longer.

What do you mean? That is exactly what I'm intending to do with it here, although I wouldn't dare push things to the breaking point outside of a lab

In fact, I do intend to break some things just to see what happens...fun times, right?