themightymrp Posted June 4, 2014 Posted June 4, 2014 This may be in the wrong place (How do you do it...??) and the topic is probably all over the place. But..... Getting a new server to act as a fileserver. It will store user homedrives and probably 2 other network shared drives. It will have 2 HDD's set as mirrored for the host OS (Server 2012 R2). It will then have 10x 3Tb drives for the share storage. My question is... what is the best/most efficient way to setup the storage for the 10 drives? I don't really want to use RAID 10 due to losing half the space but other options could be RAID 5, RAID 6 or some quirky VHD/Storage Pool option in Server 2012. Any preferences???
dhicks Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 I don't really want to use RAID 10 due to losing half the space but other options could be RAID 5, RAID 6 or some quirky VHD/Storage Pool option in Server 2012. On a Windows server, I'd be tempted to look at Storage Spaces - extensible and fault-tolerant, although probably not the most efficient in terms of amount of usable TBs you'll get from your 10 disks. 1
themightymrp Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 What would you say is the best way of setting that up? Would I create a VHDX on each separate HDD and then combine them into some kind of RAID-5 storage in the Storage Space? Which obviously you would then have to create ANOTHER VHDX inside that new 'pool'. If I'm getting this right in my head ?? Only just learning the 70-410 Server 2012 content so Storage Spaces are a new toy for me
dhicks Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 What would you say is the best way of setting that up? I don't know - we're setting up a Ceph server here, not a Windows Storage Spaces server. They seem to be similar concepts, though, so I imagine it might be a similar setup, which in the case of Ceph means setting up a filesystem on each harddrive (BTRFS, in our case) and assigning each harddrive to a separate management process.
zag Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Sounds complicated to me... that's a lot of storage and lots of individual hardware that could go wrong. Having 10 separate disks increases the likelihood of 1 of them failing by 10 times. So make sure you use redundancy in some way. I'd probably go RAID 5 but with a mind to reducing the number of disks used.
localzuk Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 (edited) With disks of that size, I would follow @seawolf's earlier advice - you really shouldn't use RAID 5. The likelihood of a failure during a rebuild is basically 1 in 1. If they were small disks (eg. 300GB or less) then RAID 6 would be my choice, anything over that size and I would look at things like ZFS or Storage Spaces etc... In this case I'd say storage spaces is a good option, definitely. As far as I'm aware, all you do for storage spaces is have the disks as normal disks, then select them as your storage spaces array and it does everything for you. You don't need to combine it with RAID. Edited June 5, 2014 by localzuk
themightymrp Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 Is that effectively like a software version of RAID then? With Windows handling everything? I think I agree that RAID 5 is out, I'm just weighing up between RAID 6 and the Storage Space options now. If I can get my head around it then I will go with the Storage Space. How redundant is it??
SHimmer45 Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 flexibility is what appears to be its biggest gain, coupled with the fact you can add in drives without the need to reboot (if hotswapping) and the storage can be added straight to a pool.
themightymrp Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 Hmmm, from what I've just been reading, Storage Spaces set up in Windows don't like sitting on top of a Hardware RAID system (you get warning messages). So I would need to create storage using bare individual disks. However, it would appear that the parity option (Raid 5) of Storage Spaces are very slow on write speed when compared to other options. This is getting tough! Does anybody use Storage Spaces on their servers who can give me some real world performance examples?
localzuk Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 (edited) Is that effectively like a software version of RAID then? With Windows handling everything? I think I agree that RAID 5 is out, I'm just weighing up between RAID 6 and the Storage Space options now. If I can get my head around it then I will go with the Storage Space. How redundant is it?? It is redundant as you want it to be - you tell it how many disks to use for striping etc... during setup. You can tell it to mirror or stripe or double stripe etc... Also, performance is much better with 2012 R2 than it was in earlier versions. So, don't discount it on performance. Edited June 5, 2014 by localzuk 1
PotNoodleTech Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Assuming you've got a decent RAID card in there with battery backup'd write cache, I'd go for Raid 10, or if you can't tolerate the loss of space, Raid 6 with a hot spare. It would be worth benchmarking storage spaces before you decide to go with it. 1
themightymrp Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 Taking the above advice into consideration (and that I haven't fully had chance to play with Storage Spaces yet), I'm going to go with RAID 6. Tried and tested and gives me 2 drive failure to work with. Thanks all!!
localzuk Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Some numbers for you regarding RAID5 - if you use standard SATA disks (WD Blue or Red I believe), which come with a 1 per 10^14 URE, you would have about a 90.9% chance of a rebuild failing. If the disks are 1 per 10^15 URE spec (WD RE4), then that probability drops to a 21.3% chance of failure. 1 per 10^16 (SAS type usually) has a 2.6% chance of failure. 2
detjo Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 We have HP G8 server with 8 x 300Gb HP SAS disks. I went with 2 mirrored for the OS (2012 R2) and RAID 5 on the remaining 6 disks. The VMs (which hold all user docs and shared drives) are on the RAID, with each VM replicated to another server
dhicks Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Getting a new server to act as a fileserver. What happens to the old file server once you've moved all the files accross to the new one? Is it available to be reformatted as a Storage Spaces server? If so, it should make for a nice easy method of expanding your storage - just add more servers to the pool as needed, distributed accross different physical locations in case of diaster. I don't know if you can specify failure zones as with Ceph, where you can group your disks / servers / racks so that data is distributed the best possible way to ensure continuation in case of diasaster.
themightymrp Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 @dhicks - as much as I like that idea, our current storage is spread over 3 servers (OLD!). One holds students drives, one staff and the other general data shares. Two of these servers are so passed it that they are likely to be scrapped. The other isn't too bad (but has only 1.2Tb storage). I may use that as a test-bed machine for playing around with Storage Spaces/Pools @detjo - I would go with the same setup in your situation with those drives. But I need way more storage (3.8Tb to hold the existing!!) and with this many drives, RAID 5 appears to be a big No No. Incidentally, the server is a HP DL380e Gen 8
seawolf Posted June 6, 2014 Posted June 6, 2014 Hmmm, from what I've just been reading, Storage Spaces set up in Windows don't like sitting on top of a Hardware RAID system (you get warning messages). So I would need to create storage using bare individual disks. However, it would appear that the parity option (Raid 5) of Storage Spaces are very slow on write speed when compared to other options. This is getting tough! Does anybody use Storage Spaces on their servers who can give me some real world performance examples? That's correct, you don't want to run software RAID solutions such as ZFS on top of hardware RAID. It can cause conflicts and provides zero benefit. Whether using hardware RAID or ZFS, your best performance and reliability option is RAID 10 (Mirror in ZFS). However, with the amount of storage you apparently need RAID 10 would be costly. So, second best option would be RAIDZ3 (triple parity ZFS RAID). Third best is RAIDZ2 or the hardware RAID equivalent RAID6. I have not personally played around with Storage Spaces so I can't really comment on it's suitability for your requirements one way or the other. It is a fairly new storage technology though, so my instincts and experience tell me that it would be wise to hold off on trusting it for mission critical data until it matures and there is more real world data to base a decision on. SS may prove to be a very cost-effective and reliable storage solution, but there's just not enough history to make that call yet - for me anyway. It should be more than suitable for non-mission critical data though. 1
themightymrp Posted June 6, 2014 Author Posted June 6, 2014 Pretty much my thoughts too on the SS front. I think I will play around on it on the freed up server. Do some speed tests etc.
themightymrp Posted June 6, 2014 Author Posted June 6, 2014 (edited) For a very interesting read about performance comparisons of hardware RAID and Storage Spaces, I found this very good: Windows Storage Spaces and ReFS: Is it time to ditch RAID for good? And also a detailed whitepaper comparison: http://globalsp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-windows-storage-spaces-r2-performance-ww-en.pdf Edited June 6, 2014 by themightymrp
PotNoodleTech Posted June 6, 2014 Posted June 6, 2014 For a very interesting read about performance comparisons of hardware RAID and Storage Spaces, I found this very good: Windows Storage Spaces and ReFS: Is it time to ditch RAID for good? Certainly an intersting read for me and confirms what I suspected. Storage spaces is currently too slow to be used in production (for me) as I'd want to use Parity Space mode to leverage storage capacity and the perfromance is dire in that mode. There is only one reason why Storage spaces won out against Raid1 in his testing and that is because he was using an LSI1068 raid card wich has laughably abysmal write speeds in Raid1. I know, as I've got serveral here that I don't use as theyre so poor (they don't even make good doorstops ffs!) If he ran his benchmarks again on modern hardware with a modern raid card with write cache - he'd find storage spaces getting spanked against Raid1 too
themightymrp Posted June 6, 2014 Author Posted June 6, 2014 (edited) HAHAH!!! supplier!! Server has arrived, but didn't know that hard drive caddies come separate and they are near £70 EACH! So currently can't plug any drives in lol Edited June 6, 2014 by elsiegee40 language
SHimmer45 Posted June 6, 2014 Posted June 6, 2014 (edited) HAHAH!!! supplier!! Server has arrived, but didn't know that hard drive caddies come separate and they are near £70 EACH! So currently can't plug any drives in lol thats appalling! i know Dell charge silly money for additional caddies (and "branded" hdds) but not to be told is rather off Edited June 6, 2014 by elsiegee40 themightmrp's language
themightymrp Posted June 6, 2014 Author Posted June 6, 2014 Yep, not good. PS - apologies about the use of language there, didn't think (and I had been following that big thread about it on here too!!) :shame:
dhicks Posted June 6, 2014 Posted June 6, 2014 Server has arrived, but didn't know that hard drive caddies come separate and they are near £70 EACH! I had the same problem last summer with our Dell servers - the servers came with caddy "fillers" that looked pretty much the same as caddies, but you couldn't actually fit harddrives in them, and I only realised when I pulled them out to fit harddrives. It turns out you can get very reasonably priced caddies from eBay / Amazon, there's a couple of UK-based companies that speacilise in them and do next-day delivery. Also, don't forget the screws, which might also be separate - you want the small, flat-head ones that don't poke out from the side as you slide the caddy in to the slot.
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