Appropriate RAID setup?

Question

I want to install / run Windows SBS 2003 Premium + MS CRM3.0 + SQL 2005 + Exchange 2003 on a PowerEdge 6600 (4x Xeon 2.0, 4x36Gb Maxtor hdd, 4Gb memory).   I consider teh following disk setup: 1. OS + programs on disk 0 2. Data on disk 1 + 2 (RAID 0) for performance 3. Hot spare to take over from any of the other three disks in case of harddisk failure   Question: 1. Can a hot spare be defined for ANY of two logical disks in an array or only for a specific logical disk? 2. Would this configuration make sense, considering    - I rather have extra performance (therefore not configuring RAID 1 or 5) and    - I can live with an incidental downtime due to an (unattended) disk rebuild to a hot spare).    - I want to have OS and data on seperate disks for ease of restore / flexibility    - I want to do this with 'only' 4 disks 3. HOW would I do this within this utility? Is there a manual that goes beond the F1 text?

ruud00000 · Answer

Some more details here: - RAID controller: PERC 3/DC (LSI) , BIOS 3.35, may 2004 - PERC configuration utility ver 827 jan 2005 - harddisks Maxtor SCSI 320 15K 36Gb  F/W: DTA1 - BIOS: Dell A17 Firmware / drivers of all the above are all the latest available.   Furthermore, I'm configuring from the Ctrl-M option during boot now; no OS installed yet.

warwizard55 · Answer

Hi rudd00000,

Hot spare is not going to help you with a RAID 0, as it's not redundant, it cannot use a hot spare to save the data. The usual method is to configure a database server as follows:

Array 0 RAID 1 containing the operating system and transaction logs

Array 1 RAID 1, 10, 5, or 50, the actual databases

alternative is a configuration where a third array is used (RAID 1) for the transaction logs.

If you have split backplanes, I've see configurations where the O/S is on a seperate BP and controller, and the data base is maintained by a second controller, this is used when the database transactions can be expected to saturate the backplane, and to improve throughput the O/S and transaction logs are seperated onto a different BP and controller.

Be sure to go into the system BIOS and disable every IRQ using device that is not going to be used (Serial , parallel, PS2 ports if present), doing so will reduce the likelyhood of high usage devices like NIC's sharing an IRQ with the RAID controller.

Regards,

warwizard

XPS710> upgrade in progress to XPS720 Quad core 2.66 GHz bought the HCL unit and a 1kw P/S, 2GB of the dominator memory, 600 GHz SATA II hard drive, a dbl layer write dvd,and a blu-ray dvd combo drive, Dual card x1950 video, a sound blaster extreme, and a phyics accelerator card.
Setting up the 710's M/B in a scratch n dent case (red) and a x1950 single board video, 4 GB of 800 FSB memory, and the original hard drives and dual core 2.66 GHz proc, sound blaster extreme, and the original dbl layer r/w DVD and CD R/W drives

ruud00000 · Answer

Yep I got confused about the hot spare. In the meantime I figured I'm going to set it up as RAID 10 instead of two RAID 1 arrays and then have one partition for OS, one for data and an smaller one for logging.   I had a setup with two RAID 1 arrays before (on previous server) and I expect some performance gain from this setup. Does that make sense?

warwizard55 · Answer

Yes RAID 10 gets you the speed improvement of striping with the write performance of the RAID 1.

ruud00000 · Answer

OK thanks for your help

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Appropriate RAID setup?

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