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8 Dell Storage PS Series Arrays: Scalability and Growth in Virtual Environments | TR1072
3 Larger volumes
Another tactic for reducing volume connections in virtual environments is to create larger volumes and fewer
of them. In many cases, administrators start with a particular volume size to host virtual machines, and as
their environment grows, the tendency is to create more volumes of the same size instead of creating or
growing larger volumes to handle additional growth. This process only works for so long, because eventually
the volume connection count starts to add up. PS Series storage supports the VMware VAAI Hardware
Scalable Locking primitive which enables denser VMs per datastore configuration without causing reservation
contention. Creating larger volumes or increasing existing volume sizes enables more virtual machines to be
placed on an individual volume, resulting in fewer volumes needed, and therefore fewer connections
consumed. This will allow environments to scale further without consuming additional connections to the SAN.
PS Series arrays support volume sizes up to 15TB. Microsoft Windows Server
®
2012 and newer supports
disk partitions up to 16EB (maximum tested size is 16TB) and since the release of VMware vSphere 5,
VMware ESXi supports datastores up to 64TB (VMFS 5 removed the 2TB limitation). This adds ability in both
hypervisor environments to utilize larger volume sizes to host VMs and ultimately reduce connection counts to
the PS Series Group.