StarWind Software

Hi all,

we are about moving to iSCSI solution (one supermicro with StarWind). We have 5 web servers, 2 SQL servers and few mail servers. I'm thinking about moving these dedicated servers to cluster (each cluster server 32 GB RAM ECC). But I don't have absolutely no clue how much and what harddrive I should use. Also I don't know if for example 12 SAS 15k disk drives in RAID 10 will be enough to handle I/O load. Can you recommend me some configurations to handle this load?

My first HW considerations was:
+ Adaptec 5805 + MaxIQ + BBU
+ 32 GB RAM ECC
+ WS 2008 R2 + Starwind
+ 12 x 300 GB SAS Hitachi 15k rpm

Thank you !

Next question in my head

Should I create one big RAID 10 volume or few RAID 1 volumes?

1) Cheap high capacity SATA drives. SAS is not going to help much as network is the bottleneck here.

2) As much RAM as you can install. We'll use every free byte as a cache.

3) Two HA nodes with Write-Back cache configured. HA makes multi-gigabyte WB cache safe to use.

4) Multiple RAID sets. To ensure you can rebuild them separately.