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We are buying a dual hex core ibm x3650 with 64 GB RAM and 7x300 GB HDD. This server is hosting two virtual servers, web server and database server. I am using Double take high availability to replicate the database into a different physical machine. Veeam is used to backup the virtual servers every night.

I was wondering which RAID configuration is best for the environment.

RAID should meet the following requirements:

  1. At the time of failure or rebuilding the array, less chance of data corruption.
    • Otherwise corrupted data will be replicated to another system
  2. As these are production system, performance needs to be high and downtime should be minimal

Any Suggestions?

ewwhite
  • 201,205
Ankit
  • 21

2 Answers2

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Neither. If virtual machine performance is paramount, you may want to consider RAID 1+0 with a hot-spare instead of one of the parity RAID variants.

VM activity tends to be mixed random read/write activity. RAID 6 is poor at the random write game. RAID 5 should probably only be considered if you're space-constrained.

RAID 10
Good when: You want speed and redundancy
Bad when: You can't afford to lose half your disk space

RAID 5
Good when: You want a balance of redundancy and disk space or have a large sequential write workload.
Bad when: You have a high random write workload or large drives.

RAID 6
Good when: You want a balance of redundancy and disk space or have a large sequential write workload.
Bad when: You have a high random write workload.

Some of the design considerations and explanations are covered in this post: What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them?

Community
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ewwhite
  • 201,205
1

I'd go with RAID6.

The performance hit is not large enough to justify raid5, but there is a large enough benefit when one of the drives fail. Since all the drives are from the same series, and with the added load of a raid rebuild, there's a chance another drive will fail too.

A simmilar question was asker before here, and goes with raid6.

If it's possible, consider raid1+0 (+spare); you'll need more drives, but achieve a greater speed.

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mulaz
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