Basic steps ESXi 4.1 cluster target

[jnowotny]

I must be brain dead, because it does not seem obvious to me on the options I need to use. Here is what I got:

I have 3 ESXi 4.1 hosts setup all with a shared old netapp iSCSI target. I can "migrate" a VM from one host to another. I want to try StartWin to see if I can get better performance and more space.

I just installed StartWin trial on a 8GB Win2008R2 box. I have a couple of RAID5 unformatted volumes setup. Now I want to create a target for my VMware cluster. I'm not sure which way to go I have read a lot of the docs and it's not clear to me which options I should be using. I think I want use "Disk Bridge" with "Asynchronous mode" and "Clustering". I want max performance so I think I want caching, not sure how much, it's a 8GB box. No idea on the cache expiry time.

On the other hand I see a lot of stuff about using a virtual disk on a already formated partition. What is the optimal way to go?

Thanks...Jim

[Constantin (staff)]

In this all configuration depends on your configuration. If you want to share your drives as is - you can use disk bridge. Personally I recommend to use image based targets - such solution (for now) provides more flexibility - you can use images for making snapshots, for example. There is no difference in performance between images and disk bridge.
For maximum performance of writing use WB cache, on reading - WT. Cache size - here all is simple - more is better. Expire period - hard question, depends fully on your configuration. For example, with WT cache and lot of WT of same data - it`s better to use longer period.