SAN - Fast Access Disks vs Windows Updates & SCCM Application Deployment

[CHiLL]

Our setup consits of2x ESXi hosts and a SAN for storage. The SAN is configured with two pools; PoolA and PoolB.

PoolA is 11x 600GB SAS drives on RAID5 and is where the server OS virtual disks live for access speeds.

PoolB is 11x 2TB LDB drives in RAID5 and is where the majority of the data is located for capacity rather than speed.

 

However, the contractor who configured our SCCM server put not only the OS drive on PoolA, but also the data drive, which is where SCCM's sources and other data lives, stating that SCCM would be best if it was all on the PoolA drives. That's fine, however WSUS is also on that server, with its updates located on the data drive, taking up ~350GB. Not only that, but I've started looking into application deployment within SCCM.

 

Now, my questions are:

1) Would I suffer any performance issues if I created a new storage drive on the SCCM server from PoolB (where we have more than enough storage remaining) and moved the WSUS installation/storage to that?

2) SCCM Application Deployment - How much would performance be degraded or would we take a hit if the source files for application deployments were pointing to the existing locations on a separate server/share?

3) Is it better to have the source installation files on the SCCM server?

4) If it is better to have them on the server, does it need to be in the Sources$ share for SCCM, or can they be located on drive from PoolB?

[johnat1121]

You would defo see a performance drop by switching from PoolA to PoolB as the 600gb drives are most likely 15k drives which will generally be allot faster, however I would be more concerned that both pools are running Raid 5 its really not suggested in newer environments because the chance of failure is so high especially on PoolB with lower end drives, in terms of performance your probably not going to notice a massive amount of difference moving WSUS to Pool B and its normally best practice to have all information from one source or share as it makes management easier however it is technologically possible to span out to other disks.

[CHiLL]

You would defo see a performance drop by switching from PoolA to PoolB as the 600gb drives are most likely 15k drives which will generally be allot faster, however I would be more concerned that both pools are running Raid 5 its really not suggested in newer environments because the chance of failure is so high especially on PoolB with lower end drives, in terms of performance your probably not going to notice a massive amount of difference moving WSUS to Pool B and its normally best practice to have all information from one source or share as it makes management easier however it is technologically possible to span out to other disks.

Thanks. I understand that there would be a performance hit of some kind, I just wanted people's opinions about what they would do in my situation.

 

As for the RAID issue, I'd like to have more redundancy, though we do have either same day or next day support from HP for replacement parts. We don't have the money to be able to increase the redundancy, as I'm assuming that would require more disks. If more disks are required, I'd need to purchase a new SAN...and we don't have the cash for that!

Edited September 22, 2016 by CHiLL

[kevin_lane]

Humm I see your problem only thing really you need to ask your self is how much stuff are you going to be putting into sccm e.g are you going to be putting your os / apps (how many ) / drivers / etc as I know now for the similar experience your having is that our content lib is starting to get big!! Especially when you start adding os images etc but lucky for us our sccm is a hyper v vm so we can just increase the space but in your case is a tricky one...they are both in a raid 5 configuration so your ok in terms of not really having to worry about a disk failure because you know you can still function but your performance will be hit........ in think if it was me I would it them on the 2TB just because of space....I don't think your really going to see that much difference yea ok it's a sas drive but it's not like a file server or an exchange server...yes you want the data to be accessed quick but i just don't see the point in not using the 2TB.....but your call