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Which RAID Controller for DL380 G7 as HomeLab?

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Benten93

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Joined
Nov 16, 2015
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Hello everyone,

this is my first post in this forum and i am looking forward that some of you might help me do decide.

I've got an HP DL380G7 (with LFF Bays) and want to populate him as a ESXi Host with an Windows Server 2012 R2 Guest as a DC and Storage Server for my home lab and several testing Guests.

For Storage i have 4 new WD RED 5TB NAS Hard Drives.
As Host-Drive i bought 2 Intel 730 480GB.

Now i dont know which is the best way to get the System running.

The Onboard Raid Controller (P410i) does not have an Cache Module yet.
If i am correct, i could create a Raid 1 of the SSDs and a Raid 10 for the Storage.
But is it a good way to handle a Storage Server based VMFS? (I would create Virtual Drives which i would add to the Windows Server)
I guess the performance would be awful, right? If i add the BBWC 512M or 1GB to the P410i does it help much?
Further i think the Backplane of the LFF Bay only supports Sata 2 (3Gbit/s) so i would never get the max Performance off the SSDs..

Another way would be to get a seperate Raid Controller to passtrough to the Windows Server and attach the 4 WD Reds or the two SSDs to this controller.
I took a look at the P420 and the LSI 9260-8i or the LSI 9271-8i (its newer and has PCI-E 3, for future).
Which one would you take? If i take one of the LSI's, does the Server gets much louder? I heard of HP doenst like Non-HP Expansion Cards.

I would really appreciate if anyone could give me some hints how i get the best performance out of this server. :cool:

Thanks,

Benten93
 
Honestly, for running the Host of ESXi, you don't need the SSDs, You can run it off a USB drive just as well; without really any performance hit, since the host primarily resides in memory once it's booted.

Now that that is said, if you want to run guests on the SSDs, then set up the raid 1 for the SSD, and the Raid 10 (or try Raid 6 if you want the ability to add more drives to the array later without pairing them, and if it supports it without the cache module). When you build your VMs, while not "recommended" you can add a hard drive, and use a different datastore to provide the space. In a Home Lab/setup, that should be fine. It's not considered best practice in enterprise (or at least, it didn't use to be), but you can easily setup to use a different datastore and simply be done with it.

Elsewise, you may want to look at Unraid 6 Pro and it's abilities for VMs and storage. They have come a long way with it.
 
Thanks for your first informations Syran! :)

I would install ESXi on a SD Card and insert it into the Server.
The SSD Raid 1 would be as storage for the VM's.

The special thing im not familar with is passing 10TB of Virtual Drives to an Windows Server Guest. I guess the Performance must be miserable.

Thats why i asked the community how they would manage that.

Anyway i should get an BBWC for the P410i, because i need to run at least one of the Arrays with that Controller right?

I dont know if its worth of spending money on an extra RAID Controller like these i mentioned.
Would be nice to hear from someone who had similar setups.

Syran you mentioned Raid6, if im correct the P410i does not support support that out of the box.. but i thought about Raid 5/6 against Raid 10 before.. :rolleyes:

Next part of the chain is the SAS Backplane in the DL380 G7.. Dont exactly know if it supports SSDs with 6Gbit/s Connections.. I guess not..

Maybe one out here might has some further hints how to manage that! :) :rolleyes:
 
I think you are over-complicating life. :)

And I was also just trying to make sure I was reading what you were doing.

Performance wise, Raid 10 > Raid 6. With 4 drives, if you never plan to increase it, going with 10 is the best option. If you plan to increase it later, Raid 6 will allow you to add drives in Singles to expand your array, instead of doubling it up. Raid 6 has technically better data protection in a 4 drive array, as any 2 drives can fail, whereas in 10, if both mirrored drives failed, you are SOL. But, Raid 6 maxes out at 2 failed drives, whereas raid 10 can handle a whole stripe failing, so long as a mirrored pair doesn't fail.

The P410i does support raid 6, but it probably requires the BBC or Flash Cache to work iirc.

When you setup ESXi, you can create multiple datastores, you will simply want to create 1 as the guest storage, and the 10TB array as a second datastore, name it NAS-data or something to remind you that it's the slower drives. When you configure your guest when you are first setting it up, you can add 2 hard drives, one on datastore1 for OS, the other on datastore-Nas for Storage. Really fairly simple.

As for the SSD on the SAS backplane, your issue is connectors simply. If it supports a SATA connector, you are fine, if it requires a SAS connection, then you are in trouble there. They are slightly different, SATA has separate connections, SAS is one longer bar that does both Data & Power.
 
I will think about your hint with upgrading the RAID.. :)

The Backplane is compatible to both, SAS and SATA! But i Guess 6Gbit/s SAS and 3Gbit/s SATA.. For the SSDs it will be a bottleneck!

Is the Performance of one 10TB virtual drive Good?
Thats the question.. But i think if no one else has experiences i will Test that before going to buy a seperate Raid Controller.

Which RAID Controller Would you get from These above to get my system Perfectly Running?
 
Honestly, if you aren't doing anything that thrashes hard drives, you will probably never notice it.
 
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