Raid 10 - choices for a better Virtualization setup

Baredor

Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2004
Messages
667
I'm planning a VMware server on a 2U box, so fast I/O is my main concern here. My options are 6x 3.5 disks or 8x 2.5 disks. 2 disks set aside for the OS mirror, so that leaves my options for the VM partiton as the following:

Raid 10

4x 3.5" 10K rpm 146GB
6x 2.5" 10K rpm 73GB

Obviously I will take a large hit in disk space by using the 2.5" drives, but would the RAID 10 perform significantly better with 6 disks instead of 4?

I can make the 3.5s into 15k rpm as well. Is this preferable over the 6 2.5s?

Comments appreciated.
 
hmm... 2.5" drives are quite a bit slower than 3.5"s for raw throughput (less surface area per rotation). I think fujitsu makes 10-15k 2.5s, but ... less performance & capacity at much higher cost? (even with 6x drives).

I guess it depends on what you're doing with the VMs. I've been running vmware with 2x 38gb 15ks and didn't notice any difference over 2x 320gb 7200mb IDEs. (tangent: a narrow partition on higher density platters seem to perform same/better in "normal" loads than lower density scsi drives, but may not be true for pure random accesses).

Btw... what controller are you using for this?
 
Btw... what controller are you using for this?

Dell PERC5/i

Most of the VMs will be doing light duty machines that do some "burst" work on a set schedule. These are mostly FTP and EDI boxes, MQseries, a 4th domain controller, and possibly other stuff like WSUS or something - probably 10-12 VMs in all. Nothing heavy like SQL or Exchange. I think you basically gave me my answer, but interested to learn more if anyone else can comment. :)
 
Back
Top