HP LeftHand SAN Solutions Support Document - User Manual - User Manual VSA 7.0 SP1 for VMware

12 Chapter 1
• Co-location of a VSA and other virtual machines on the same physical
platform without reservations for the VSA CPU and memory.
• Co-location of a VSA and other virtual machines on the same
VMFS datastore.
• Use of VSAs on other VMware platforms such as VMware Server,
Workstation, or Player.
Hardware Design for VSA
The hardware platform used for a virtual SAN affects the capacity,
performance, and reliability of that virtual SAN. The following hardware
features specifically affect the VSA configuration:
• CPU
• Memory
• Controllers and Hard Disk Drives
• Network Adapters
CPU
Because the CPU of the VSA must be reserved, platforms that will host a VSA
and other VMs should be built with more processor cores to accommodate the
additional VMs. Multi-core processors with at least 2GHz per core should be
used so that a single core with at least 2GHz can be reserved for the VSA. All
additional cores are then available for use with other VMs, thereby avoiding
resource contention with the virtual SAN. For example, a platform with two
dual core processors could host a VSA and use 3 cores to share for other VMs.
Memory
Similarly the memory of the VSA must be reserved. For platforms that will
host a VSA and other VMs, build in additional memory to accommodate the
additional VMs. Assuming the hypervisor and management applications will
use less than 1GB, all memory beyond 2GB is available to use with other VMs,