Deploying Cisco V11 UC on B200-M3 NFS-NAS storage

[guy.richard]

Hi,

I am facing this dilemma: I am deploying a 7500 users UC V11 Cluster on the customer virtualization infrastructure. The Servers are B200-M3 with 2.6Ghz CPU. that is ok. The only storage I can use is NFS-NAS.  When deploying the OVA, thick disk provisionning option is gray out.

As the the thin provisionning is "allowed" but "not recommended" (I know the risk of having not enough space to a VM to grow up) what will be a best practice:

1) deploy the VMs on another server and storage DAS ou SAN in a thick provisionning manner and after that move the VMs files on the NAS storage.?

2) keep on deploying the VMs on the final NAS storage in a thin provisionning ?

Thanks in advance

[Jaime Valencia · Accepted solution]

Either option is valid, not too sure if you will get the option to use thick provisioning during the storage vMotion. You could probably use the same as original (can't recall exact wording)

As you mentioned, thin provisioning is supported, with the caveat that there needs to be a tight control to make sure that VMs do not find themselves without the required space to grow as necessary, as they might become useless.

It would depend on whether they're willing to take the risk to use thin provisioning, or would rather use thick provisioning. Might want to talk with the guys managing the NFS to see if they have had problems in which they run out of space when using thin provisioning, if they have, I wouldn't go that way.

[guy.richard]

Hi Jaime,

Thank you for your interest on my question. I openned a case near the PDI Helpdesk. So this is their point of view, quite close to yours:

- On NFS datastores that do not support Hardware Acceleration, only thin format is available.

- moving machines created on a SAN datastore to the NFS datastore may be risky.

- They confirm Thin deployment is supported and to reduce the risk of lack of free space I'll ask the customer for a "dedicated" NFS datastore.

Kind Regards.