RAID 1 / RAID 5 and setting up Server to use RAID 5 for data

[rickatwork]

I have an ESXi setup on vmfs3 file system on the RAID1 on a Dell box. What I want to do is install my VMs in this vmfs volume but then have my RAID 5 setup as an NTSF where my VMs can access this data volume. For example, install Windows Small Business Server on the vmfs3 volume as a vm. Then have the RAID5 setup as an NTFS volume used by the small business server to host the data.

Am I thinking about this correctly or should the RAID 5 also be setup as a vmfs3 volume then just create a vm drive inside of that for my NTSF volume? I was thinking if I did that I would lose performance.

Rick

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Forums - to keep management simpler I would create a second VMFS datastore on the RAID5 set - also rememebr there is a size linmitation to the LUN the ESX host can use which is 2 TB -512B

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[rickatwork]

Thank you for the reply! Do you feel there is any performance loss running the RAID5 as a vmfs? The LUN size should be good, I'm at 550GB.

Rick

[weinstein5]

any performance impact is minimal and is not noticed

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[rickatwork]

In this server's case, I have two 140GB drives RAID 1 and 3 300GB drives RAID 5. I've placed the VMs on the RAID 1 and placed the Virtual Disks on the RAID 5. How would this performance rank with the VMS on RAID 1 volume and the VIRTUAL DISKS on the RAID 5 volume?

Rick

[Morat]

That's the traditional setup for a windows server with the OS on a raid1 partition but raid 5 on three spindles is wasteful. I'd swap the 140Gb drives for two more 300Gb drives (or the other way round if budget is really tight) and use one large raid5 partition as suggested above. ESXi is so tiny it will be fine on a memory stick. Think of it as a small SSD :smileyhappy:

[RParker]

Do you feel there is any performance loss running the RAID5 as a vmfs?

Keep in mind if performance is your goal, then you should consider making the entire disk array RAID 5. Those 2 spindles you are losing as RAID 1 will do no good, since ESX doesn't use any DISK IO, it's a VM host, so it's not running anything.

So I would make those 2 disks a part of the RAID 5 configuration, install ESX across ALL the drives, and it will create the remainder free space as VMFS.

Spindle count is key when it comes to VM performance. The more disk spindles the better.

[DSTAVERT]

As an add on to Mr Parkers suggestion I would install ESXi to a USB stick (a supported install). Upgrades or reinstalls don't need to touch the array at all.

[J1mbo]

To add to the comments on spindle count, this is absolutely correct and depending on the number of disks in your server, I would use the extra two spindles to move the array to one large RAID-10 array which will perform very much better.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk/benchmarking-storage-for-vmware/

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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