look at the document attached at the bottom of this discussion

https://community.emc.com/message/554050#554050

If you are talking about Storage Pools in VNX, you can use RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 1/0. You can then choose to create either thin or thick LUNs.

I am going with Raid 5. Can we do 61 or do we have to go with 31?

When you are creating storage pools, you do not have to choose the RAID configuration manually. The default for RAID 5 is 4+1 and it is recommended that the number of drive in your pool should be a multiple of 5 when using RAID 5 in the pool. This will create the private RAID Groups in an ideal 4+1 configuration automatically. If the number of drives is not a multiple of 5, then the 'extra' drives will be automatically added to private RAID Groups. Again, you dont have to do anything manually to choose the RAID configuration.

You can look up the document which dynamox referred to in an earlier post for more details. You can also look up the Virtual Provisioning whitepaper on Powerlink.

In flare 30 Clariion CX4 arrays we can only do raid5 41. I am just curious if we can do raid5 61 with flare code.

I will go through the doc dynamox suggested also.

Thanks!

Strictly speaking with VNX it's no a thin pool

A pool itself is neither thin or thick - you can create both types of LUNs in it

sure, here is a R5 pool that was created with 6 flash drives ...you get a warning message that says 5 drives is optimal but it does not stop you.

The 'RAID groups' section of the EMC Unified Best Practices for Performance and Availability: Common Platform and O.E. Block 31.0 -- Applied Best Practices white paper discusses RAID levels supported.  You should also review the 'Pool provisioning' section.

VNX Best Practices is recommended reading for all VNX system administrators.  It contains the answers to the most frequently asked questions about the VNX, along with insight on how the different features work.  It also includes provisioning examples.  This VNX Best Practices document is available for download on Powerlink.

iflaas,

I just wanted to discuss what happens when recommended multiples are not added upon intitial pool creation (or expansion):

1) From the drives being added, it will try to create as many private RG's of the recommended multiples which are:

(Number of disks/recommended multiple)

a) RAID 5 = 3
b) RAID 1/0 = 2
c) RAID 6 = 4

If it does, then it will create another private RG from the left over drives

If it doesn't, then it will distribute amongst the private RG's it calculated in step 1 above
NOTE: the distribution will only be amongst the new candidate private RG's (and not existing in the case of pool expansion)

Therefore, applying this to your choice of a RAID 5 pool with 7 disks for initial creation, your pool will be configured as follows:

2) Since the the minimum is not met for RAID 5, it will create 1x (6+1) private RG

I hope this makes sense.  Then again, maybe more than you need (or care) to know.

This is exactly what I was looking for. I appreciate the insight.

For some reason I like to know the inter workings.