HP Storage Server Storage Configutation

[talksr]

Hi there,

I have a new HP ProLiant DL380 Gen10 server which we are to use as a storage server.

It comes with 8 x 1TB 7.2k SAS drives and 4 x 7.2k 2TB drives.

 

Our current storage server has the same amount of storage space but had an additional in-built drive for the OS.

This does not, but it does have a micro SD slot.

 

Can anyone suggest to me the best way to set this server up. The old one had a mirror raid.

Would I be best off mirroring everything this server has in it's drives and buying a micro SD card for the OS. If so, can anyone recommend the best micro SD for the job?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

[mavhc]

What's the base OS going to be?

[talksr]

What's the base OS going to be?

 

Sorry, should have mentioned, either server 2016 or 2019.

Our current one has Storage Server 2008R2 which is now too old and Microsoft no-longer do Storage Server versions.

Edited April 15, 2020 by talksr

[Norphy]

Installing Windows on an SD card is not ideal. It can be done but I wouldn't recommend it. If you're going to run an OS on a SD card, it should be a hypervisor or something like FreeNAS.

 

As for the storage configuration, this is one of those "How long is a piece of string?" questions. There are many different answers and none of them are necessarily the correct one. Whichever option you choose is going to be a tradeoff.

 

What kind of storage is the server going to be used for? Shared file server? Personal storage area? Archives? How important is access speed compared to raw capacity?

[talksr]

Installing Windows on an SD card is not ideal. It can be done but I wouldn't recommend it. If you're going to run an OS on a SD card, it should be a hypervisor or something like FreeNAS.

 

As for the storage configuration, this is one of those "How long is a piece of string?" questions. There are many different answers and none of them are necessarily the correct one. Whichever option you choose is going to be a tradeoff.

 

What kind of storage is the server going to be used for? Shared file server? Personal storage area? Archives? How important is access speed compared to raw capacity?

 

 

 

Thanks for your reply. Good point re putting windows on an SD card. I had not thought about that.

This will be a shared file server. I guess I could use one of the drives for the OS but not sure how I would do the rain that way. Or do I buy another, smaller drive (or two) just for the OS? I have four more available slots.

[Norphy]

What storage controller is in the server? Does it support running drives in HBA mode, rather than in RAID mode? The difference between the two is that HBA controllers allow the OS to access the disks directly, rather than through an abstraction layer like a RAID volume.

 

If so, you could install Windows on one of the disks then set up a Storage Spaces volume rather than hardware RAID. That will allow you to use the space better than a pure RAID array.

[talksr]

What storage controller is in the server? Does it support running drives in HBA mode, rather than in RAID mode? The difference between the two is that HBA controllers allow the OS to access the disks directly, rather than through an abstraction layer like a RAID volume.

 

If so, you could install Windows on one of the disks then set up a Storage Spaces volume rather than hardware RAID. That will allow you to use the space better than a pure RAID array.

 

Hi, I am not too sure how I can check out which controller it comes with.

This is what it says on the warranty page:

HPE DL380 Gen10 4208 1P 16G 8SFF Svr

On the original order, it said:

DL 360 G10/Silver 4208/16gb/8 x 2.5 drives/P408i/50w/5yr warranty/6 x 1tb/6 x 2tb

 

Not sure if this helps, but all of the hard disks plug into a board in the PCI expander section of the server. This board has a sticker on it which says aec-83605/hp2. I notice it also has an M.2 hdd slot on it also.

 

[talksr]

Just checked with supplier, the controller is P408i-a

[mavhc]

Where's the m2 slot? sounds like a possible option.

[Norphy]

On a RAID controller, SSD slots like that are generally used for caching, rather than as extra storage devices.

[Norphy]

Ok, looking at the spec sheet for that range of storage adapters here: https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/a00047736enw.pdf

 

The card can be run in both RAID and HBA modes so you can use Storage Spaces with Windows or ZFS with something like FreeNAS.

[talksr]

Ok, looking at the spec sheet for that range of storage adapters here: https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/a00047736enw.pdf

 

The card can be run in both RAID and HBA modes so you can use Storage Spaces with Windows or ZFS with something like FreeNAS.

 

Thank you for your help on this. This is slightly out of my depth and what with the virus outbreak, it is proving hard to get in touch with suppliers to work out the best option.

So do you mean I could potentially use the M2 slot to put Windows on?

We have always used Windows before and joined it as a domain controller to our main FRDC.

[Norphy]

So do you mean I could potentially use the M2 slot to put Windows on?

 

No, I don't think so. Going by the spec sheet, the M2 slot is meant to be used as a cache; data that's frequently access is copied to the SSD and retrieved from that instead of the spinning rust. I don't know how that would work with JBOD. Ultimately, I think it means that you can't put an SSD into that slot and expect to be able to access it as another drive.

 

I think your options are:

 

Use the storage controller as a hardware RAID controller and set up volumes on that. The drive loadout you've got there is somewhat peculiar to be honest but these are the options I can see:

 

1 large RAID 10 volume spanned across all 12 drives, 6TB big. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

2 RAID 10 volumes, spread across the different sized drives, both 4TB in size.

 

1 large RAID 5 volume across all 12 drives, 11TB total size. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

 

1 large RAID 6 volume across all 12 drives, 10TB total size. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

 

2 RAID 5 volumes, 7TB (8*1TB drives, 1TB of which is parity) and 6TB (4*2TB drives, 2TB of which is parity).

2 RAID 6 volumes, 6TB (8*1TB drives, 2TB of which is parity) and 4TB (4*2TB drives, 4TB of which is parity).

 

Using RAID 5 on drives this size and speed is not recommended. If a drive fails, the amount of time it takes to rebuild the array is massive and increases the change of another drive failure during rebuild.

 

I'd only use RAID 6 when write performance is not an issue, like a backup archive, as the processing overhead for dual parity drive arrays is massive. I wouldn't use it for user shares.

 

RAID 10 gives you the best read/write performance out of all the options as there is no parity overhead. It also gives you the same redundancy as RAID 6 as it's able to tolerate up to two drive failures and should a drive fail, the array rebuild time is the lowest. However, it means that 50% of the raw drive capacity is "lost".

 

 

Or you could put the controller into HBA mode. That treats the drives as a bunch of individual disks and lets the operating system manage them directly. Windows has a feature called Storage Spaces which allows you to bundle disks into a single volume. It's also a bit more flexible when you have different sized disks. You have similar redundancy options to hardware RAID but the advantage is that it's easier to expand the array later on with additional disks if you want to. The disadvantage is that any parity calculations that the RAID controller did before are now being performed by the server's CPU so overall server performance and disk performance will be reduced, although not by much on modern CPUs.

[mavhc]

Is the m2 slot on the raid card or the computer's motherboard?

[talksr]

No, I don't think so. Going by the spec sheet, the M2 slot is meant to be used as a cache; data that's frequently access is copied to the SSD and retrieved from that instead of the spinning rust. I don't know how that would work with JBOD. Ultimately, I think it means that you can't put an SSD into that slot and expect to be able to access it as another drive.

 

I think your options are:

 

Use the storage controller as a hardware RAID controller and set up volumes on that. The drive loadout you've got there is somewhat peculiar to be honest but these are the options I can see:

 

1 large RAID 10 volume spanned across all 12 drives, 6TB big. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

2 RAID 10 volumes, spread across the different sized drives, both 4TB in size.

 

1 large RAID 5 volume across all 12 drives, 11TB total size. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

 

1 large RAID 6 volume across all 12 drives, 10TB total size. You'll waste half the capacity of the 2TB drives doing that, you're essentially treating them as 1TB drives

 

2 RAID 5 volumes, 7TB (8*1TB drives, 1TB of which is parity) and 6TB (4*2TB drives, 2TB of which is parity).

2 RAID 6 volumes, 6TB (8*1TB drives, 2TB of which is parity) and 4TB (4*2TB drives, 4TB of which is parity).

 

Using RAID 5 on drives this size and speed is not recommended. If a drive fails, the amount of time it takes to rebuild the array is massive and increases the change of another drive failure during rebuild.

 

I'd only use RAID 6 when write performance is not an issue, like a backup archive, as the processing overhead for dual parity drive arrays is massive. I wouldn't use it for user shares.

 

RAID 10 gives you the best read/write performance out of all the options as there is no parity overhead. It also gives you the same redundancy as RAID 6 as it's able to tolerate up to two drive failures and should a drive fail, the array rebuild time is the lowest. However, it means that 50% of the raw drive capacity is "lost".

 

 

Or you could put the controller into HBA mode. That treats the drives as a bunch of individual disks and lets the operating system manage them directly. Windows has a feature called Storage Spaces which allows you to bundle disks into a single volume. It's also a bit more flexible when you have different sized disks. You have similar redundancy options to hardware RAID but the advantage is that it's easier to expand the array later on with additional disks if you want to. The disadvantage is that any parity calculations that the RAID controller did before are now being performed by the server's CPU so overall server performance and disk performance will be reduced, although not by much on modern CPUs.

 

 

Thanks for taking the time to post this detailed reply.

Ok, that makes sense to me.

 

I wonder if I should buy an M2 anyway to help with the caching? Might as well, they are not that much money.

 

Your suggestions with the RAID make sense, but I wonder if all of this could be solved if I just buy one or two more additional drives and add them to the front of the server and use them as OS drives?

If I got two 1TB drives as an example, could I not mirror them both and then use all of the-existing raid as storage space on one of the raids you have suggested above?

 

If not, then I am tempted to go with your RAID 10 suggestion.

 

Thanks again for your help on this.

[Norphy]

There is no reason why you can't buy a couple of drives and have them as a mirror for the OS. No need for 1TB drives, even 500GB NL-SAS or SATA drives would do the job quite cheerfully.

 

Putting in an SSD cache certainly won't hurt matters. Make sure you buy one on the HP HCL, rather than some generic thing from A N OTHER supplier. A cache is likely to need a write intensive-capable SSD and more than that, it wouldn't surprise me if the controller refused to use anything which didn't have an HPE firmware on it, HPE are buggers for doing that.

 

If you want to use Storage Spaces (or ZFS for that matter), you can't use hardware RAID of any description. The OS needs to be able to access the drives directly, which is why I was asking if the controller supports HBA mode.

[mavhc]

Get SSDs for the OS drives

[Norphy]

Get SSDs for the OS drives

 

I really don’t see the point. Once the OS has booted there is no real advantage. Data will be in the RAID arrays so the actual service the thing is running won’t benefit. SSDs from HPE aren’t cheap and you’d have to get an HPE one for this to work. Why spend the extra?

[mavhc]

I just use the sata ports on the motherboard, no point over paying for HP stuff

[CAWJames]

I think current thinking on RAID is to get rid of the old R1 for OS and other RAID for Data, and go OBR10, One Big Raid 10. Disks are cheapish these days, and there is no need to have a seperate OS array.

[talksr]

Thanks for your helpful posts.

I ordered an additional 2 x 600gb drives.

 

The server now has 14 drives.

6 x 1tb

6 x 2tb

2 x 600gb

 

Also, was I added an SSD to the controller as we had the budget so thought it made sense to use it up.

 

I have loaded up the RAID config screen, and am thinking of going for RAID 10 (Raid 1+0)

 

 

Does this seem best?

 

Edited May 5, 2020 by talksr

[CAWJames]

10 is usually the best to go for these days, mirrored and striped array. You lose half the storage, but gain redundancy and keep speed to a maximum, in terms of rebuild and access.

[mavhc]

Can't you do software raid?

[talksr]

Went for 10 and used the HP integrated storage software. Has been working a treat since. Thanks everyone for your input and help on this. I really appreciate it.