Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
7 Posts
0
106792
Raid Size & Partition/Volume Size (Windows 2012)
Hello,
I just purchased a brand new Dell R720 with Windows Server 2012 Standard (64-Bit)
I got the RAID H710 (512MB Cache)
I want to know the gold standard for setting the RAID Size, Volume and Partition for Data. This will be used to hold VHD Files for Hyper-v.
I have ONE Raid-1 Setup (2x150GB) for the OS
I have ONE Raid-6 for a total of 6x3TB 3.5" Drives, so there is one Virtual Disk of 10TB, is this okay?
I then partition the 10TB in to 2TB partitions in windows (GPT).
Am I doing this correct? I want to make sure I'm setting this brand new lovely server enterprise status.
It will be hosting bunch of VHD Data files. with 4-vms but a lot of VHD files around 1-2TB each.
Cheers
theflash1932
9 Legend
9 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
0
November 4th, 2012 19:00
I will let someone else address the RAID settings for VHD. Setting up a single Virtual Disk of 10TB is fine, as long as you switch to UEFI and convert the 'disk' to GPT before installing.
kyaride
7 Posts
0
November 4th, 2012 20:00
Okay so I have a 10TB Virtualdisk on my LSI RAID-6, what about carving the 10tb vd in windows?
2TB Partions? or one whole partition?
Thanks!
theflash1932
9 Legend
9 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
0
November 5th, 2012 07:00
As long as you install Windows in UEFI mode on a GPT disk, then you can carve up the 10TB however you like - 1x10TB partition, 100x100GB partitions, etc. If you install Windows in BIOS mode or on an MBR disk, then Windows will not be able to see/use more than 2TB.
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
November 5th, 2012 09:00
I'd recommend a single partition max size with the largest possible block/cluster size (64KB for NTFS).
If you make it multiple partitions and later run out of space and want to grow the virtual disk, you can only add the extra space to the last partition on the disk (short of needing downtime or using some (usually) expensive software).
The option to make the raid 6 multiple virtual disks will mean you could never expand the raid 6 (limitation of the PERC controllers).
If you want to split the IO some, I'd suggest to make it multiple raid 6 arrays (though 2 4-drive raid 6's yield the same space as 2 4-drive raid 10's, so it'd be hard to justify the space loss).