I am sure that there are many factors involved here but when standing up new servers it seems we are always wondering which virtual disk option should we select and what would give us the best performance. We have an enterprise class san and the network is 10gb.
Once upon a time it seemed that using an in-guest iSCSI connection from within the VM to the SAN offered the best performance. From what research I have done it doesn’t seem like that is really the case anymore and the only reason to go with something other than VMDK would be if there was some sort of application requirement. But finding documentation on specific application requirements in a VMware environment is not an easy thing.
Somehow I did come across documentation (VMware\Microsoft?) for Exchange 2016 where the VM should reside on a VMDK and the database and logs should reside on separate RDM disks so I got lucky there.
Unless specified, is there any reason to choose anything but VMDK these days? Does one storage option (iSCSI, VMDK or RDM) really outperform the other anymore? Just curious, what are you using in your environment or how did you make that decision? I think in our environment my main concerns would be with Exchange, SQL and our File Servers. The servers being beat up the most my end users.
I am not really too technical so my apologies if my questions are too generic.
Thank you!