md3000i w/ 15 450Gb 15k SAS RAID setup?

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Karandras

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 16, 2001
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Hey,

So we have an older SAN with 15 450Gb 15k SAS drives. It's going to be for our ESX cluster. I was trying to figure out the best RAID setup for these drives. I'm trying to avoid the 2 drive in RAID 5 failure. My plan is to do 2 7 disk RAID 5 with 1 hot spare for both arrays. SO that would be 2.7 Tb for a total of 5.4Tb, a rebuild might take a few hours. The other option is RAID6 to do 2.25Tb for a total of 4.5Tb. I also thought of RAID10 using all the drives but my boss doesn't like losing that much storage down to 3.1Tb.

If I did the whole SAN for RAID6 would give 5.85Tb but I'm thinking that might be too many machines on one LUN plus a really long rebuild time.

Which would be the best way to deal with this space, I haven't setup a SAN before and want to make sure it's done right the first time.

Thanks!
 
The MD3000i is not supported in later versions of vSphere last I checked. I know it doesn't answer your question specifically, but thought i'd point that out.
 
Currently we have an md3000i in production with our ESX 5.5 clusters (2).

We need to do maintenance on the SAN (adding a 3rd shelf) but this SAN requires a full shutdown to add another shelf. Weird if you ask me but whatever. So we got this 2nd SAN with 3 shelves to storage vmotion all the vms to so I can do the maintenance on SAN1.
 
Since you have multiple shelves on your MD3000i, How is the SAN setup now? I assume that your question is just referring to the setup of the new shelf, correct? What kind of info will be on it? VMs, File Storage, Databases, etc?
 
Nate,

The other md3000i has a mishmash of 147gb sas, 450gb sas, 600gb sas and 1tb sata in odd sized LUNs. I'm looking to set this one up properly to give the best uptime incase of a hard drive failure.

This will have everything you just mentioned ;-) VMs, File storage, Databases and probably a local repo...which falls under file storage.
 
Assuming a single large array to be built, I'd see a couple of possibilities with varying degrees of popularity. I like the redundancy of RAID6, but with everything else you'e asking the controllers to do, performance will take a significant hit. RAID50 (2 x 7drive RAID5 w/ 1 spare) is another possibility for a balance between performance and capacity, but recent best practices lump that in with RAID5 as far as desirability goes. RAID10 would be the best performing, but as we all know has the biggest capacity hit. The alternative to a single array is to continue in the practice of carving up the shelf into separate arrays for different purposes. Also, remember that you have a SAN with different shelves. You are adding a shelf, not another SAN :D
 
Nate7311 said:
RAID50 (2 x 7drive RAID5 w/ 1 spare) is another possibility for a balance between performance and capacity, but recent best practices lump that in with RAID5 as far as desirability goes.
Click to expand...

RAID50 would also be my suggestion.
As for the part in bold, that is only an issue when using large (2TB+) drives a.f.a.i.k.
 
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