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Best RAID Cfg. to run VMWare ESX3i on 2950 w/4x500Gb and 2x80Gb
Hi:
I'm looking for the best RAID cfg. to run VMWare ESX3i on a 2950 w/4x500Gb and 2x80Gb. Normally I'd cfg. the 2x80Gb in RAID 1 for OS. However, since I plan to use VMWare's hypervisor I don't need the OS RAID partition. Can I run all six discs in RAID10 and get 1080 usable for the hypervisor?
Also, anybody out there running MS Exchange and MS SQL on the same box using VMWare's hypervisor? My understanding is it's doable preferably using RAID 10. But is it proven and stable???
Thank you,
BaliBob
Dev Mgr
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April 28th, 2009 07:00
Any raid config other than JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) will use the smallest disk's size as the basis of the raid container. So if you made a raid 10 with 4 x 500 + 2 x 80, you'd get a raid 10 with 240GB (3 x 80).
I'd suggest to buy 2 more 500GB drives and replace the 80's with the 2 new 500's and make a 6-disk raid 10 (of about 1500GB).
Raid 10 is the best choice when using slow drives (7200 rpm) but still doing a lot of random natured IO (like multiple virtual machines). Raid 5 or raid 6 are going to give you much less performance, so I'd stay away from those raid types when running virtual machines (especially when using 7200rpm drives).
Note: ESX/ESXi can't use virtual disks over 2TB.