topic Re: how many volumes for VMs? in VMware Solutions Discussions

how many volumes for VMs?

illuminate — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:22:37 GMT

Hi guys,

we are currently using a NetApp FAS2050. At the moment, we have 2 volumes for the VMDK LUNs without data dedup. Is it useful to make just one volume for all the VMDKs and activate data dedup? (Basically we have Windows 2003 Servers and a few Linux distributions running) Are there any disadvantages which we should know?

what about multipathing? are there any benefits in using more LUNs for the same volume as in using only one LUN?

thanks in advance for your help!

best regards

Andi

Re: how many volumes for VMs?

radek_kubka — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:15:19 GMT

Wow, plenty of questions in one post!

Probably you'd be better off doing some initial reading about 'official' best practices:

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3428.html - for ESX 3.x

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3749.html - for vSphere 4

And this is your 'de-dupe bible':

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3505.html

Regards,
Radek

Re: how many volumes for VMs?

illuminate — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:23:48 GMT

Thanks for your reply!

As written down in the documentation, NetApp recommends a one-to-one alignment of VMware datastores to flexible volumes. Since I have changed our environment to this (1 LUN -> 1 Volume), I get the following message in vSphere Client:

http://666kb.com/i/bdh6dlgz9xviu5lkf.gif

On the mentioned VMs there is no multipathing anymore ... does it affect redundancy or HA?

regards,

Andi