Release Notes

Data Drives
14 Best Practices for Implementing VMware vSphere in a Dell PS Series Storage Environment | TR1091 | v1.3
The Dell EMC support staff has seen tremendous performance improvements by making these few
changes.
Note: Virtualized RDMs and VMDKs prior to ESXi v5.5 are limited to 2TB-512b in size in all versions of ESX.
6.2 iSCSI in the guest VM
You can take advantage of iSCSI in the guest VM by using the guest VM iSCSI software initiator. This also
allows vMotion and all of the other VMware tools to work.
Advantages:
• Isolates the data drives for Data Protection/DR strategies. This technique also allows you to isolate
your data drives to a volume that may have different replication and snapshot strategies than the
volume that houses the parent VM.
• Can be mounted on physical or other virtual machines. If you have a VM crash or just want to
dismount and remount the data, you can easily do this through the iSCSI initiator.
• Uses the same best practices as physical environments. This technique is the same technique used
for the physical environment. If you perform a P2V migration of a server that has iSCSI attached
volumes, you can continue to run the VM with very little change to the server.
• Allows tiering of data drives to different volumes and pools based on workload. Since the data drive
resides directly on a SAN volume, it can perform faster and can be placed on a different SAN tier
from the VMs other virtual disks.
Disadvantages:
• It is not visible to vCenter. Because the volume is managed from the VM itself, vCenter will not see it
in the storage tab and you will not see it connected to the VM when editing the properties. This can
cause some additional management overhead.