We used the following design principles and best practices to create the VMs in this reference architecture:

• SCSI controllers—We created multiple SCSI controllers to optimize and balance the I/O for the different database disks, as shown in the following table.

Table 4.        SCSI controller properties set in VMs

• Datastore mappings—We assigned the following properties to all database-related virtual disks such as DATA, Log, TempDB, and Backupdata:

• Type: Thick provision eager zeroed

We selected Thick provision eager zeroed to ensure that the space required for the virtual disks is allocated at creation time and the data on the physical device on the storage is zeroed out.

• Sharing: No sharing

We selected No sharing because the deployed databases are stand-alone databases that do not require sharing database virtual disks with another VM, unlike clustered VMs that share virtual disks between two or more VMs in the database cluster.

• Disk mode: Independent persistent

• VM vCPU and vMem—The following table lists the distribution of virtual CPU (vCPU) and virtual memory (vMem) to the database VMs.

Table 5.     VM configuration: vCPU and vMem

• Enable disk UUID—In each of the VM options, we added the configuration disk.EnableUUID parameter and set it to TRUE. This setting ensures that the VMDK always presents a consistent UUID to the VM.