Best way to configure Datastores in VMWare with Starwind

[hongman]

Hi all

What I have currently:

SAN with Starwind (15k SAS + 7.2k SATA)
2 ESX Hosts
4 VM's - DC, vSphere Management, SQL, Exchange
Some vApps

Some VM's have more than 1 disk within Windows. For example, Exchange has a disk for OS (7.2k), a disk for Mailboxes (15K), and a disk for Logs (15K). Domain Controller has OS disk (7.2k) and a Fileshare disk (7.2k)

Currently I have created a target within Starwind for Exchange OS, Exchange Logs, and Exchange Mailbox. Each one of these targets are connected to VMWare as an individual datastore, of course which have the VMDK inside.

So over the 4 VM's I have a lot of datatstores connected:
DC-OS
FileShare
SQL-OS
SQL-Databases
Exchange-OS
Exchange-Logs
etc...

Each target is defined as a Snapshot and CDP disk with WB-Caching enabled.

My question is, is this the right way to do it?

Or should I have created 1 larger target, and created seperate folders and VMDK's within 1 larger target?

I think the way I have done it is correct, as I think I gain more granularity and performance (as each target gets its own WB-Cache), however it looks very messy in vCenter.

I was watching a training video on VMWare and the instructor had it as 1 datastore per target, with multiple VM's in it, and it got my wondering if I had done it right!

[Max (staff)]

Well, most of our clients put multiple VMs on the one target, there is only a difference if you're tiering the storage on your SAN side - like having OS images on SATA disks and the DB images on the SAS RAIDs