When setting up storage for ESXi systems, before creating VMFS datastores, you must decide on the size and number of LUNs to provision. You can experiment using the predictive scheme.

Procedure

  1. Provision several LUNs with different storage characteristics.
  2. Create a VMFS datastore on each LUN, labeling each datastore according to its characteristics.
  3. Create virtual disks to contain the data for virtual machine applications in the VMFS datastores created on LUNs with the appropriate RAID level for the applications' requirements.
  4. Use disk shares to distinguish high-priority from low-priority virtual machines.
    Note: Disk shares are relevant only within a given host. The shares assigned to virtual machines on one host have no effect on virtual machines on other hosts.
  5. Run the applications to determine whether virtual machine performance is acceptable.