Hi, in one of our DMX4, we have 5 Raid Groups of 300GB 10K drives (7+1).
Our device size is about 60GB (65200 ).
Now we are planning to move Exchange DB and VMWare stores to that area. Based on my undestanding, in a 5 raid groups scenario, striped meta should not go over META5, while Concatenated Metas could go over 5 but with an impact on perfromances since we are reusing the same raid groups in the meta.
So what would be our best config for Exchange and VMWare?
You can most certainly make a striped meta out of RAID5 volumes. I would not recommend concatenated (serial meta) except in some extreme corner cases, and then all on the same RAID group. There is a SymmWin feature to do this.
You might not want to stripe that striped meta again at the host level.
Wrapping is generally not a good idea. If you have an option to stripe at the host, a good compromise would be to make 5 serial metas on your 5 raid groups, each 1/5th the size of the LUN you need, then combine these at the host level into one striped volume.
unfortunately to stripe on windows host you have to use dynamic disk or Veritas storage foundation. Dynamic disk is not supported by MS clustering and storage foundation is big $$$.
Quincy AFAIK concatenated meta are quite different from serial metavolumes... A concat meta is available through symconfigure while a serial can only be built using symwin. Now I expect a few more questions on serial metavolumes...
Serial meta volumes are something I asked for when we were trying to come up with tape library for Symmetrix. They are as close as you can get to a native large RAID5 volume as you can get. All the members in order down a raid group, concatenated down the same drives. We were making two 2TB volumes out of one 7+1 raid group and presenting them to the tape library units. These sorts of configurations can be good for large sequential operations without a ton of threads.
Ok, let say I cannot strip at the OS level and still need big volumes, which one would you choose between a striped meta that wraps around vs a concatenated meta?
concat for sure. With striping you need every symdev to sit on a separate raid group and with concat the performance impact when "reusing" the same raid groups isn't as high as with striping.
Quincy561
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Posted October 30th, 2009 07:00
You might not want to stripe that striped meta again at the host level.