RAID Reccomendations for new SAN

[dpedersen]

Hi -
I'll start by apologizing if my question has been answered elsewhere. I also apologize for the rambling. I looked and found items discussing cache, and some comments around starwind raid and hardware raid, and I looked at the system requirements… I Figured I'd ask and see what I can learn a little more specific to my situation. I'm looking for feedback on my planned setup.

I am working on replacing an aging data core SanMelody SAN (nope, never upgraded since it isn't an in place upgrade to San Symphony) and I'm going to be working with starwind on my new SAN next week. I'll be starting with the free version and upgrading as funds are available / utilize RAM for Cache

This is a budget system designed to run a small business, adding HA of a second SAN down the road. for backups I'm running nightly backups of the VMs with vRanger and will be implementing replication with vReplicator.

I'm using esxi 5.0 with three hosts running sphere essentials (essentials plus is on the roadmap) VMs are mostly workstations - ~ 20 win 7 and a 5 servers. 1 SBS, a domain controller, a Storage server and 2 in-house (low transaction volume) SQL databases. iSCSI over 1gb connections will be the transport.

Configuration of the SAN is still able to be modified. Right now the san is shaping up to be a
super micro X9SRI-F
16 7200rpm SAS drives
single xenon E5-2620
16 gig ram
single LSI 9280-16i4e mega raid controller 512 onboard cache.
Windows 2012 server standard

My big Question is starwind JBOD vs hardware raid vs "hybrid" with Starwind and HW raid. The cache discussion here http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t3102.html has me moving to star wind managing all the disks, while the system requirements has me looking at hardware raid.

For HW Raid I was going to go OS Raid 1, Three Raid 1+0 with 2 hot spares. I was thinking to get the best performance with reasonable disk redundancy. I'm not sure on the raid striping, seems to be 512 or 1 meg looked best. I'm currently using RAID 5 with 64k striping and after testing it looks to be contributing to high latency issues that I'm having with the current equipment.

My goal is to move everything to the new san, recondition the old san (replace drives) and either move to a HA san solution or use the old san for vm replication

What are your experiences with hardware raid 1+0 vs no raid and go JBOD?
Random IOPS trumps storage space

I'm going for speed and reliability on a terribly low budget

Any and all questions, constructive comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!
Dylan

[Anatoly (staff)]

Hi!
Thank you for posting on our forum.
OK, so the main questiion is storage consideration. There are few thinkgs that I`d like to say/mention:
*The starwind is hardware agnostic (when talkking about vendors);
*Use the HW RAIDs only;
*The RAID 0, 1 or 10 should give you great reliability and performance results
*Good performing system is well ballanced system - you need to be sure that none of the hardware or software parts will be wasted.

As about hte rest - you can always refer to our Best Practices documentation.

I hope it helped