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Allocation of SCSI/RAID Devices
Details
What are the major considerations when choosing how I should
allocate my SCSI/RAID devices?
Solution
Allocating SCSI/RAID devices is a little bit trickier than
allocating Ethernet devices. You do not have as fine grained control
over how you allocate your SCSI/RAID devices. The unit of device
allocation is a PCI card device. With SCSI/RAID, you may connect
multiple SCSI/RAID disks, CD-ROM drives, tape drives, and other
devices to the SCSI/RAID adapter. Some SCSI/RAID cards will also have
multiple functions, resulting in multiple adapters on each card. When
you allocate a SCSI/RAID device to the console operating system or to
the VMkernel, you must allocate all the SCSI/RAID disks, CD-ROM
drives, and other attached devices along with the SCSI/RAID device.
As a result, you have only coarse-grained control over how you
allocate SCSI/RAID devices.
When allocating SCSI/RAID devices, the same principle as the one
used for Ethernet devices applies. You should give as many SCSI/RAID
devices to the virtual machines as possible to ensure that the
majority of your mass storage resources are used by your virtual
machines. If you do not have any IDE disks, you may have to allocate
at least one SCSI/RAID device to the console operating system, since
the console operating system needs to have a disk from which it and
the VMkernel can boot.
SCSI/RAID devices can also be shared between the console operating
system and the VMkernel. See answer 178 at www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=178
for more information about the circumstances under which shared
SCSI/RAID should be used.
Keywords
177; 178; urlz
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