Software RAID5 setup ... questions

A

Asgorath

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 12, 2004
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What I am trying to build is a software RAID5 setup that is capable of growing as I add more disks. I currently have 3 x 1TB drives that I would like to RAID5 and a jumble of other drives I can use as I see fit. I am building a file/ application server.

I like windows server 2003 from an administrative standpoint. I can control user level shares, setup FTP, HTTP, WebDav, print, and whatever else floats my boat. However, a software RAID5 in windows cannot have disks added to it later without nuking and rebuilding the array.

For this I like using a linux/unix based OS that supports MDADM. the --growfs command is perfect for me.

...

What I was thinking of doing was running VMWare ESXi under everything. Then run Openfiler and setup my big array to be an iscsi target. I would then set up windows and have it point to the target. Shares would then be managed from windows.

Just my guess, but I'd say an internal iSCSI server/target would be very fast (almost that of a directly connected hard drive). The processor running all of this is a 2.4GHz Athlon X2 w/ 2GB memory.

What do you guys think? Can you think of a better way for me to tackle this problem? I could use a RAID controller, but that would blow the budget.

Thanks.

Greg
 
Two things, finding antivirus for 2003 sucks because it's usually more expensive. Otherwise I like 2003 quite a bit myself. I've heard that you can't add disks to software RAIDS in a couple of places... how is that different than a rocket raid card? It's pretty much software as well right?

Second, why not get a cheap rocketraid card. The one I have works really well, and I imagine you don't have an incredible amount of SATA ports on your mobo.

Linux to me is like the joke everyone else gets, but I'm still trying to get it.
 
i had set up an ESX Server infrastructure 1 1/2 years ago for a company, for virtualizing their development environment, so a few questions come to my mind:
- you're sure it runs on your hardware?
- if i remember correctly, ESX can't handle RAID by itself. normally, a real RAID controller is used for that part in company environments
- you're running through several layers with your iscsi target:
ESX (VMDK) --> Openfiler (linux device of the VMDKs) --> Openfiler iscsi target --> Windows iscsi initiator
i guess that might slow things up?!
 
Umm what Athlon X2 motherboard supports ESXi? http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_systems_guide.pdf

And it seems like an interesting idea, but I am not sure how the iSCSI would work targeting itself in and out of the same network card through two virtual network cards. And even then, you'd probably get better performance and all the capacity expansion you need from a decent RAID card for not too much money. (I think the dell PERC5's do this and are cheap on ebay)
 
Regardless of raidlevel you should always have backup as well. With that in mind you can take down the current array and rebuild it with the new disk. Normally this should go faster than expanding. If you go the Windows Server way, Nod32 works a charm.
 
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