HA setup recommendation

[logicmate]

We are planning on using a HA setup at a remote data center with the following hardware configuration. What are you thoughts and recommendations?

we will have 2 identical servers setup:

Supermicro 4U (upto 36 drives)
Dual Quad Core Xeon 5620
Windows 2008 R2
12GB Ram
Adaptec 5805Z controller
2 x 50GB SSD (Raid 1 - OS partition)
8 x 600GB SAS 15K (Raid 10 - Storage Partition)
8 Nics

Here are my questions
1. Is 12GB Ram sufficient?
2. Should we use Hardware or Software Raid (My guess is Hardware will perform better?)
2. Should we use Windows 2008 R2 Standard or Enterprise edition?
3. The Nics will be teamed in pairs for redundancy spanning 2 seperate switches, so we will have 4 Teamed Nics.
1 Team will be used for Public Interface and 3 Teams will be used for ISCSI traffic using MPIO.
How does the syncing work between the 2 HA Nodes? Via ISCSI? If so do we need dedicated ISCSI Channels between the nodes or just use the current ISCSI nodes?
4. Our initial capacity planning requirements are a minimum of 1500 iops, 65% Read, 35% Write with 50Mbytes/s Random transfer.

Any suggestions/recommendations would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Ara

[Max (staff)]

Hello Ara,
1. 12 Gb may be even too much, the general rule of thumb for caching is 1gb/tb of storage.
2. Hardware and only hardware.
Also I'd like to recommend you to look for LSI cards due to some recent performance problems with Adaptec RAIDs
3. make sure that teaming is the best practice for your hypervisor, e.g. VMware recommends no teaming for best performance. Sync runs on iSCSI so you need to make sure that the bandwidth between your servers is not less than one to the clients.
4. Benchmark the local RAID to see which performance do you get locally. StarWind will steal 2-5% maximum, depending on the block size you use for iSCSI drive benchmarks.

[logicmate]

Max thank you for the quick response, few more points I have.

1. Unfortunately our datacenter only uses the Adaptec 5805Z so that's our only option.
2. So if we have 3 Nics for client ISCSI, we need 3 Nics for Sync ISCSI?
3. We will mostly be running WIN2K3 and WIN2K8 clusters as clients and 2 client's as VMware. (Would you recommend breaking up the teaming?)
4. Is windows server 2008 R2 Standard sufficient or we should consider Enterprise?

Thanks,
Ara

[logicmate]

One more question, the Nics that will be used for Sync can we use MPIO or it has to be Teamed?

Thanks,
Ara

[anton (staff)]

V5.7 and before - teamed.

V5.8 and up - MPIO.

One more question, the Nics that will be used for Sync can we use MPIO or it has to be Teamed?

Thanks,
Ara

[logicmate]

We are planning on implementing this project within the next 1-2 weeks, will v5.8 be available or still Beta?

Ara

[Max (staff)]

Max thank you for the quick response, few more points I have.

1. Unfortunately our datacenter only uses the Adaptec 5805Z so that's our only option.
2. So if we have 3 Nics for client ISCSI, we need 3 Nics for Sync ISCSI?
3. We will mostly be running WIN2K3 and WIN2K8 clusters as clients and 2 client's as VMware. (Would you recommend breaking up the teaming?)
4. Is windows server 2008 R2 Standard sufficient or we should consider Enterprise?

Thanks,
Ara

1.In this case there can be a possible performance drop
2.Correct, otherwise you'll hit a 2 gb/1gb bottleneck
3. Windows clients can benefit from teaming but VMware will prefer MPIO, I think you need to give it a try and see what will work better for you
4. Std will do, you can also use core version if you want some CLI practice .