Dell EqualLogic FS7500 - Manual (Page 12)

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads
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Figure 3.
Multiple Virtual Workloads in a VMware environment on Dell EqualLogic FS7500
Test Hardware Configurations
The test hardware configuration consisted of two ESXi servers with 128GB of RAM, quad-socket, 12-core
processors yielding 48 logical CPUs. Both servers were running VMware vSphere v4.1 Update 1
hypervisor.
Two Dell PowerConnect 6248 Gigabit Ethernet switches were used for the front-end and back-end
connectivity; segmented internally via VLANs. While this is usually not a recommended best practice
for production networks, it provided the connectivity we needed for this test environment.
The EqualLogic FS7500 consisted of one pair of controllers and up to three EqualLogic PS6000XV arrays
operating under a single group address. Each EqualLogic PS Series array contained 14 600GB 15K RPM
SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration with approximately 3.66TB of usable space each. Arrays were
added one at a time to test performance scalability.
Six shared datastores were configured on each ESXi server; three were using NFS exports on the FS7500
and the other three were using block I/O using VMFS.
The test began by utilizing only one PS Series array. As the tests progressed, additional arrays were
incorporated into the storage pool. Testing progressed only after the PS6000XV arrays had completely
balanced the existing data across the newly added array.