VMware RAID Level and Stripe Size

[aaronearles]

Cross posted this in the virt section, looking to get opinions from the two different groups here, so hopefully that's not a big deal...

Okay, so I'm putting together a whitebox for ESXi, I have a perc5/i and 6x 1TB 7200 SATA drives, the plan was to put them in RAID10 because I'm not real concerned about capacity, just decent performance. I don't have a specific application in mind, it will mostly be used for windows labs and testing software, nothing intensive but I'd still like to configure it for best performance, and I plan to house my fileserver there too just as a crao datastore but I would like it to be redundant.

So, because I'm leaning more toward performance, not capacity, I was thinking raid10 because of the small writes each os will be making to the drive - figuring parity calculations will slow things down with lots of small writes. Is the performance difference significant enough to give up 2TB on the array, or would you recomment RAID5 instead?

Also, any suggestion on stripe size? OS writes are going to be mostly small stuff, but the vmdks are going to be quite large, but I'm not sure if that matters...

Thanks guys!

 

[sub.mesa]

128KiB stripesize or bigger, do not use XP on striping RAIDs; make sure your filesystems are aligned. Not only the first but also additional partitions you may have.

 

[aaronearles]

just going to be one fs, the vmfs, not sure how to align it though?

 

[nitrobass24]

do not use XP on striping RAIDs;

First off the OP is going to be running ESX.
Secondly there is no problem with using XP on RAID
Third, All common RAID levels except for RAID1 use striping.

OP just use which ever stripe is largest for that controller.

 

[aaronearles]

lol perfect, thank you.

raid10 sound good for OS (guests) use?

 

[nitrobass24]

lol perfect, thank you.

raid10 sound good for OS (guests) use?

RAID 10 is good for VMs.