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What's best way to setup RAID with 6x2TB for ESXi?
The limitation of VMWare ESX to only allow a LUN of a bit less than 2 TB is kind of frustrating. I was hoping to use six 2TB sata drives in a RAID10 configuration to get the best speed from slow drives. So I guess I have 3 questions (note this is using a PE 2950 III with PERC 5):
Am I correct that I cannot somehow get a RAID10 arrangement to "present" ESXi with 3 LUNS of 2TB each?
If I can't use RAID10, should I use 3x RAID 1 virtual disks or 2x RAID 5 virtual disks? Isn't RAID 1 faster than RAID 5?
Maybe an academic question, but what is purpose of a disk group? Seems like a group and a virtual disk are the same thing.
BTW, I'm adding post here because a Dell support rep in a chat said (and I AM copying and pasting here), "Well, a RAID 10 can be created only with 4 drives, a RAID50 would consist of 6 drives. As far as having it present itself to the OS as 3x 1TB LUNs, it will first be presented as a single LUN and you'll need to partition it from there." This doesn't seem correct somehow.
Dev Mgr
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June 3rd, 2011 08:00
You would make a 6-disk raid 10, but then carve that into 3 virtual disks (under the advanced option when building the raid set in the PERC bios).
This does mean you can never expand the raid 10 (as this isn't possible with multiple virtual disks on a raidset), but a 2950 only allows 6 harddrives anyway, so this isn't really an issue (unless you'd later move the drives to a 2900 or so (that has more drivebays).
cincinnerdi
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June 3rd, 2011 10:00
@DEV MGR
"You would make a 6-disk raid 10, but then carve that into 3 virtual disks (under the advanced option when building the raid set in the PERC bios)."
This sounds like EXCELLENT news! But, I have to ask "how?"
Starting from Ctrl-R with a cleared config, I create a virtual disk. When I choose RAID 10 and check to add all six disks, the "Advanced" box only offers, "Stripe element size", "Read Policy", "Write Policy" and "Initialize".
Dev Mgr
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June 3rd, 2011 21:00
Check out this tutorial; it's for a PERC6, but it should basically be the same procedure on a PERC5.
I was mistaken about the section where to specify the virtual disk size; it's under the basic section (VD size).