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Needing advice on RAID Controller for home SAN

B

bmatic

n00b
Joined
Jul 6, 2013
Messages
12
I would appreciate it if those who have a setup like I'm requesting would chip in some information.

I currently have an old PC (core 2 quad q6700 with 8gb of RAM, intel mobo) that I am using as a Hyper-V host. I only have 2 VM's on it due to the RAM limitation with this motherboard. I am using the onboard Intel RAID utility currently and I am powering 2 x WD Green 1TB drives and 2 x WD Blue 500GB drives. They are both running in RAID-0. I currently have no redundancy between the drives.

So... This is what I'm looking at doing. I am hopefully going to be replacing those WD green drives with 4 x WD Red 2TB. I am also looking at getting a hard drive cage to house them (see below).

The only thing that I am not sure about is a RAID Controller. I am looking to get a dedicated controller that will fit into an x16 or x1 (I'm not sure I have an x4) PCIe (v.1) slot, I would like to be able to use RAID-5 in the 4 drive setup for redundancy, and depending on cost, it would be nice to be able to connect up to 8 drives to it. Another thing that I think will be important is to be able to hotswap drives as well.

I'll be looking forward to your replies, and thanks in advance.

Hard drive cage:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215244

WD Red Drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343
 
Last edited:
bmatic said:
I would appreciate it if those who have a setup like I'm requesting would chip in some information.

I currently have an old PC (core 2 quad q6700 with 8gb of RAM, intel mobo) that I am using as a Hyper-V host. I only have 2 VM's on it due to the RAM limitation with this motherboard. I am using the onboard Intel RAID utility currently and I am powering 2 x WD Green 1TB drives and 2 x WD Blue 500GB drives. They are both running in RAID-0. I currently have no redundancy between the drives.

So... This is what I'm looking at doing. I am hopefully going to be replacing those WD green drives with 4 x WD Red 2TB. I am also looking at getting a hard drive cage to house them (see below).

The only thing that I am not sure about is a RAID Controller. I am looking to get a dedicated controller that will fit into an x16 or x1 (I'm not sure I have an x4) PCIe (v.1) slot, I would like to be able to use RAID-5 in the 4 drive setup for redundancy, and depending on cost, it would be nice to be able to connect up to 8 drives to it. Another thing that I think will be important is to be able to hotswap drives as well.

I'll be looking forward to your replies, and thanks in advance.

Hard drive cage:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215244

WD Red Drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343
Click to expand...

Its not clear if you are looking for a dedicated SAN/NAS or a simple raid for your Windows machine. I also can only speculate about your board.

For a dedicated highend NAS/SAN-storage solution you can

- use ZFS and software raid on Sata/AHCI ports (no need for hardware raid, works much better without)
- newest/fastest ZFS bits are from Solaris/ OmniOS
- for easy management, you can use webbased appliances (my free napp-it or NexentaStor CE). They are easy to install and to manage.

You can boot from a (16 GB+) disk or a fast USB stick - best as a ZFS mirror.
Hotplug may not work (you need to reboot to replace disks). Next step is a HBA like a IBM 1015 to add up to 8 disks with hotplug capability.
 
Last edited:
_Gea said:
Its not clear if you are looking for a dedicated SAN/NAS or a simple raid for your Windows machine. I also can only speculate about your board.

For a dedicated highend NAS/SAN-storage solution you can

- use ZFS and software raid on Sata/AHCI ports (no need for hardware raid, works much better without)
- newest/fastest ZFS bits are from Solaris/ OmniOS
- for easy management, you can use webbased appliances (my free napp-it or NexentaStor CE). They are easy to install and to manage.

You can boot from a (16 GB+) disk or a fast USB stick - best as a ZFS mirror.
Hotplug may not work (you need to reboot to replace disks). Next step is a HBA like a IBM 1015 to add up to 8 disks with hotplug capability.
Click to expand...

I am basically looking for high availability storage that I will use for a couple of hyper-v guests running on a server 2012 installation.

With ZFS, which I am not familiar with, will that integrate with server 2012? If I wasn't clear, I apologize, but the board I have does support raid, but I was wanting your opinions on weather to get a raid card for the added benefits of speed, reliability, etc.

Thanks.
 
I would see how it runs first with your current setup, and then adjust. It sounds like you want to just use one box with a raid card with Hyper-V, so really any raid card will work fine for you. LSI is a big name, most of their stuff is supported by Server 2012.

If you're running into RAM limitations with 2 VM's, I'm guessing storage won't be much of a bottleneck for you regardless of how you set it up.
 
Thank for your reply. You are correct, I will be running Hyper-V on server 2012 with a couple of guests. The RAM is fine now, I don't think I'll need more ram especially once I move to a Core only install. Having said that, I would like to know some RAID card model numbers that you guys suggest based on the discussions in the thread. I would like to try and keep costs down as well, but with something that's pretty reliable and good support.
 
A (maybe controverse statement)

- such a controller is the best solution for raid-5 /6 on Windows but
- Raid 5/6 is slow regarding I/O (this is what you need for VMs)
- Raid 5/6 is quite insecure even with BBU (write whole problem) but on Windows, there is no better way like ZFS
- maybee WinRe FS may be an option some day for a secure storage but currently it is bad/slow by design

I would look at a cheaper Raid 1/Raid 10 controller without BBU and Raid-5/6 option, eventually think about SSD mirrors
LSI and Areca are the best options
 
Ok... so for ZFS, what i've read about it, seems like a great solution for just storage, but how would I be able to still keep Server 2012 and Hyper-V running? Should I have another VM set up in Hyper-V and configure ZFS and present storage that way? I'm not sure of a good way of doing it without using 2 different systems.
 
bmatic said:
Ok... so for ZFS, what i've read about it, seems like a great solution for just storage, but how would I be able to still keep Server 2012 and Hyper-V running? Should I have another VM set up in Hyper-V and configure ZFS and present storage that way? I'm not sure of a good way of doing it without using 2 different systems.
Click to expand...

If your hardware is capable, you might consider running an all-in-one SAN/Hypervisor on VMware ESXi.

I'm converting each 6+ bay server at work into a host like this, running nexentastor as a guest on the hypervisor for a ZFS pool, which is then passed back to ESXi via iSCSI.

Lets you do something akin to RAID6 + zfs features for a pool for your vm guests.

There is a huge thread on how to get started in this forum for the "ESXi All-In-One".
 
hotcrandel said:
If your hardware is capable, you might consider running an all-in-one on VMware ESXi.

I'm converting each 6+ bay server at work into a host like this, running nexentastor as a guest on the hypervisor for a ZFS pool, which is then passed back to ESXi via iSCSI.

Lets you do something akin to RAID6 + zfs features for a pool for your vm guests.

There is a huge thread on how to get started in this forum for the "ESXi All-In-One".
Click to expand...

I don't think that my board is supported for ESXi

It's an Intel DG33TL.
 
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