Help me organise my storage

mrbios · 11 Dec 2012 at 14:31

Assuming it's storage for VMs and it'll be access by two host servers, what's the best setup out of these two:

2 x RAID10 array of 4 drives then split into 2 partitions
or
1 x RAID10 array of 8 drives then split into 4 partitions

I don't know how partitioning affects the IOPs performance of a RAID10 array?

DRZ · 11 Dec 2012 at 14:46

What do you mean by partitions? Exported as two different LUNs?

I'm not sure on the architecture of how those systems present out LUNs but if you can create a single container and then export a LUN for each VMFS volume, I'd do that.

mrbios · 11 Dec 2012 at 14:58

DRZ said:
What do you mean by partitions? Exported as two different LUNs?

I'm not sure on the architecture of how those systems present out LUNs but if you can create a single container and then export a LUN for each VMFS volume, I'd do that.

On these you create your logical drive > logical volume > partition the volume > then select which partition you want to create a LUN for. At the moment i have 3 arrays each split into two partitions, so i've got a total of 12 LUNs (multipath IO) connecting to 4 VM hosts

Laser402 · 11 Dec 2012 at 15:40

I'm not sure about how you setup your VM infrastructure. However I would;

2 x iSCSI chassis with 4 disks each in RAID10

1 LUN on each chassis no partitions.

Present the LUN to each of the VM hosts. This gives each host access to fast shared storage, which any other host can pickup if it goes down. Also keeps administrative overheads low and stops over complicating anything.

VMware VMFS takes care of the multiple hosts connected to a single LUN, I'm not sure what hypervisor you use?

mrbios · 12 Dec 2012 at 13:51

Yet another question, basically I only know what about 20% of these options actually do, some i have a hunch but still don't know for sure, the rest I've left at default and never touched them but feel free to explain away or recommend best values (VM storage again):

Some of the LUN ones and the write back cache are the only options i really know...though i don't even know if i should be setting it to periodically flush or not?

Give me some learning ocuk, teach me what it all does