New Servers

[richbrowncardiff]

Hi Everyone, looking to see what everyone is doing with their Hyper-V setups....

 

Taking delivery of our new hosts tomorrow and want to see how you setup the RAID arrays on your hosts. Traditionally I always used Raid 5 + hotspare but not sure if this is still the best way to go?

 

New hosts are Dell R730XD with 24 x 300gb sas Drives

 

Also how much RAM do you give your sims server ? currently 32gb but its struggling atm (we have 150 concurrent users on sims and a busy data manager and attendance team! (Reports, Data Analysis + Sims Discover etc) was thinking of allocating 64gb of RAM but as we all know SQL will take whatever you give It. I know you can limit the RAM SQL uses but been told this isn't the best thing to do unless totally no other option.

 

thanks in advance all.

[DMcCoy]

With 24 drives, you could do two RAID6 of 11, with a dedicated hot spare, or you might want a mix with a RAID10 for your databases.

 

RAID5 is out with that many drives, and assuming you are using the full sql, then I wouldn't go too mad with SQL memory, 16 is probably plenty considering the db sizes for sims.

 

Also UPDATE THE PERC H730 firmware asap if you have one! Lost a whole array from a new server install on the day before term started :| There is an issue with the T10 protection option, the firmware update disables it. The server announced all the drives had come back (it didn't say they went...) and no resync, but windows crashed 30 minutes later and there was no usable data left on the array. No partitions! Although testdisk recovered them, chkdsk deleted everything when repairing.

 

It's not just a Dell issue afaik as ibm also got a mention when I was researching, most re-brand the LSIs.

 

Thankfully I'm still a tape fan, and the post migration backup was fine, so a reinstall and restore later after firmware update had a running server again, keeping a close eye now though!

[markwilfan]

I have 2 hyperv hosts with 192gb ram each, 2 ssds in raid 1 for os and a 9tb raid 10 array on each one for vms. They absolutely fly. Decided against clustering with shared storage as just couldn't afford a decent solution

[localzuk]

I stick with RAID6 for bulk type data now. And RAID 10 for things like SQL databases. I also never use hot spares. They're a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Cold spares are a better idea. Gives you a chance to make sure you've got a proper backup before kicking off an array rebuild.

Edited September 15, 2016 by localzuk

[richbrowncardiff]

Thanks All for the input - much appreciated ! Will go with a Mix of 10 & 6 i think!

[sonofsanta]

I stick with RAID6 for bulk type data now. And RAID 10 for things like SQL databases. I also never use hot spares. They're a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Cold spares are a better idea. Gives you a chance to make sure you've got a proper backup before kicking off an array rebuild.

 

As someone with a hot spare alongside my RAID 6 array, could you elaborate?

[pcstru]

As someone with a hot spare alongside my RAID 6 array, could you elaborate?

 

Why a HOT-SPARE Hard Disk is a bad idea?.

[PotNoodleTech]

Dell R730XD are brilliant servers, I've got two and using 8 x SSD in Raid 5 local storage in each server. They're ludicrously fast.

[bossman]

2 x Dell R720s 192GB RAM with 2 x 300GB SAS drives mirrored connected via 4 teamed Nics to 2 x 1GB switches for failover to 2 x Synolgy R3614xs+'s clustered with high availability manager for fail over.

 

Backups to DPM2012r2 server connected via 4 teamed GB Nics connected to another Synolgy R3614x with 34TB storage over 12 Raid6 SATA drives (WD Reds 4GB) from here using DSM plugin for Azure to the cloud.

 

Total cost for kit £14k + setup time and Licenses

 

Running 20 VMs and not even utilising 5% of total CPU capacity.

[pantscat]

2 x Synolgy R3614xs+

 

Do you use the SSD cache feature on these? What's the performance like? Synology kit seems to be getting better and better.