Release Notes

Datastore size and queue depth
10 Best Practices for Implementing VMware vSphere in a Dell PS Series Storage Environment | TR1091 | v1.3
4 Datastore size and queue depth
While administrators continually try to maintain an optimized data layout and performance, the size of the
datastore becomes a question. Because every environment is different, there is no hard-set number.
However, you will find recommendations of 10-30 VMs per datastore. A number of factors in this decision
include speed of the disks, RAID type and workload intensity of the VMs.
Having one VM for each volume can pose an abundance of administrative overhead, while putting all VMs on
a single datastore could cause a performance bottleneck. Determine the most beneficial compromise by
monitoring the environment with SANHQ to find volumes that may be underperforming. In addition, monitor
the queue depth to see if there are outstanding I/Os to a volume indicating that too many VMs may reside on
that datastore.
The current VMware maximum supported datastore is 64TB. The PS Series array can create a maximum
volume size of 15TB.