ESXi: SSD for Datastore Guests?

[WeeboTech]

Here's my intel drive, It shows usage longer then the Vertex, but that's not true.

The vertex was idle for at least 6 to 8 months because I was getting paranoid of loosing my vmware vmdisk environment.

For the record, this intel drive has the intel toolbox installed (for XP). Note how it does not have trim supprt.

In any case, Thanks for heads up on the SSDlife, now I can keep an eye on things. Makes me want to check them all out.

[kaiguy]

Hey guys, would you mind giving me some advice on how to best utilize my drives?

 

My server upgrade which should take place tomorrow or Wednesday will probably have 3 VMs (unRAID, Win7, and a Linux flavor). 

 

I will have a 2 TB Green drive and a 120 GB SATA3 SSD for ESXi use.  I am currently using a 1 TB WD Black drive as my unRAID cache, which also acts as my temp directory for Plex transcoding, usenet downloading, etc.  That Black drive actually is quite a workhorse.

 

My original plan was to transfer off the Plex and usenet stuff off to another Linux VM, but then I realized my Linux knowledge really isn't all that great.  So my thought is to now push that over to Win7, rolling a vanilla unRAID along with a Linux VM to better learn that environment.  Now I just am having difficulty figuring out how to best split up the drives.

 

Any suggestions?  Is it bad for longevity to write logs and do video transcoding on an SSD?  Should I be symlinking my log directory over to a spinner?  Maybe take unRAID's lead and create a ramdisk for such items?  So many options!  TIA.

[Johnm]

I would put the SSD and the 2TB drive as datastores.

 

run all 3 OS boot drives from the SSD..

then use the 2TB for VM backups, ISO storage and  any secondary (VMDK) drives you might need for your guest (like usenet download target). possibly even use it for test and sandbox guests.

 

 

[WeeboTech]

I would put the SSD and the 2TB drive as datastores.

 

run all 3 OS boot drives from the SSD..

then use the 2TB for VM backups, ISO storage and  any secondary (VMDK) drives you might need for your guest (like usenet download target). possibly even use it for test and sandbox guests.

 

This is how I would do it.

With the Linux machine you can have two vmdisk's also, one for the OS and another for temporary and long term storage.

 

Writing logs to ssd is not so bad if they are not written to that often. I've not had any problem with my linux machine on SSD.

 

It was the windows 24x7 machine on SSD where I saw it had potential to kill the drive sooner.

If I had a secondary drive or ramdisk for the temp/pagefile and file intensive stuff, I might not have seen the issue.