Best drive setup for R620 Rack Server running vSphere

Hello,
Just a topic where the ideas of others in the community can be useful. Different applications may need different RAID configurations. In addition, there may be different solutions according to the needs of the user. I think if a single RAID array and a single Data Store are created it will be much easier to manage and will work properly. RAID5 or RAID6 can be used. Please note that no RAID configuration can keep you safe unless you take backups of your servers.

 

A RAID5 structure puts more strain on the disks and is more likely to fail. When this happens, you may lose the array. With RAID 6, you get an extra parity drive for protection and faster rebuild speeds. Usually, RAID6 is a bit more protective, so it makes more sense to have 2 drive failure protection.

 

Specifies that SQL log files are stored in a separate array from the database. For this, it can be RAID 1 with the smallest number of drives. Everything else can be RAID10 as well.

 

Or you can put everything in one big array, and if you use separate arrays for HDD, there may be performance degradation. Depending on the number of drives, if there are few drives, I think you can use a single OBR in this sense.

 

Hope this helps!

Actually I was wanting to know more about the types of drive to use to get the best performance from my VM's. I'd like redundancy so I'm considering RAID 10 as I understand that will give me the best read/write for a raid configuration.

Is SATA SSD an option for the hot swap bays?

If not, I'm wondering about spindle speed. Is there much performance difference between 7K/10K15K? 

What is the impact likely to be in my VM's?

Hello,

in order to have hot swap SSD drive in R620 you need to have a Dell PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe card.

For the speed, yes from 7K to 15K there a big improvement in speed. Unfortunately we don't have benchmark data but you can find it a lot of documentation about it in the Net.

Thanks

Marco