What RAID setup do you use in your school?

[Sonic007]

Hi everyone,

 

What sort of RAID setup are you using for your domain controller and sims servers in your school?

 

Would you say it is better to have a RAID setup or to have a backup server that can just take over?

 

 

Thankyou.

[dhicks]

What sort of RAID setup are you using for your domain controller and sims servers in your school?

 

Our main virtual machine server, running Windows Sever 2019, is using Windows Storage Spaces. The (small) boot volume is a simple RAID-1 mirror of two drives. The rest of the disks are presented to Windows as individual disks (I think we put a separate HBA card in that server) and it sorts out how it handles redundancy and failover. We have both smaller, faster SSD disks and larger, if slower, mechanical drives, so we have Storage Spaces use the faster SSD layer as a caching tier.

 

We also have a Synology server which we use to back up Google Drive, it has a similar disk setup to the above server, which it has all the stuff built-in for - you just tell it what disks you want in which layer and it gets on with sorting out how they are split up.

 

Would you say it is better to have a RAID setup or to have a backup server that can just take over?

 

A RAID setup (or, at least, some kind of physical disk reducndancy) shouldn't add much additional cost to a server these days - having a second server for failover is more of a nice-to-have option.

 

We've actually just turned off our old main Windows file server and domain controller(s), which took up the larger part of the resources on that main server, so if we do refresh our on-site server hardware at some point we might only need a small device with a basic RAID-1 mirror to run the few services we still run locally.

[3s-gtech]

I have lots of physical servers still, because 2005 is peak IT yo.

 

RAID 10 is my go-to. I also have RAID 60 on one array. Nothing on RAID 5. Due to the age of kit I get a few dead disks a year - with decent RAID configs I have a chance of avoiding outages (including during rebuilds).

[CHiLL]

It's always important to remember that RAID is not a backup solution, you should have a separate backup solution regardless.

 

Our production storage (HP MSA) and both our backup solutions are all configured in RAID5 by our configuration partner back in the day (10 years ago). It's been one of those things where it's been pretty much rock solid bar I think three disk failures during that time and no data loss. We were going to look at replacing our MSA and also re-look at our storage and backup requirements, though we have since decided to start migrating to SharePoint and then relook at our backup solution to ensure it will continue to meet our requirements.

[Davit2005]

2 DCs on different hardware and a backup of both AD and SIMs.

 

RAID these days for performance does it matter with SSDs? In the old days you used to have the database files on RAID 5 and the logs on mirrored RAID because the logs needed faster access.

 

Yep you can get all fancy with HA/cluster solutions but as an org need to decide the required SLA and uptime.

[Rob_D]

For us, anything with a large storage capacity (backup serves, file servers, virtual hosts, etc) is RAID5. OS drives (like on a DC), would be RAID1

 

Anyone using ZFS, I keep hearing about it as an alterative (mostly on LTT), but not really looked into it.

[kierans]

Our HyperV hosts run RAID 1 for the host OS and RAID 10 for VM data Edited October 31, 2024 by kierans

[TomL]

Not in EDU but Servers here are either RAID 6 or 10.

 

I've inherited a few Servers in my time & the odd few only have 1x array; with the OS just being a separate 'partition' to that of the Data.

 

Do people still use 2x "Small" drives for boot volumes these days; or is a single array more common practice (w/ partitions)?

[dmj]

 

Would you say it is better to have a RAID setup or to have a backup server that can just take over?

 

I'd say it's better to have ZFS pools, everytime.

[psydii]

Trad three hosts, fibre channel to a low-end (typically a rebranded quantum) SAN, with *lots* of disks, groups up and raid6 with a hot spare per 8 or so physical disks.

 

Hosts may or may not have a raid1 boot SSD.

 

Extremely simple and extremely easy to get 3rd party support.

 

They typically can get 8 years of 24/7 manufacturer support/warranty too. Got 9 out of the last one.

 

Run basically this same set up since 2008.

 

Occasionally I look at some sort of hyper-converged roll-your-own thing but it never seems worth the hassle.

 

If it throws a fit on a Sunday afternoon, I want to pick up the phone and have an engineer on site by 6pm. If it loses a disk I want one out with a courier before I’ve even noticed the alarm.

 

Multiple RAID 6 plus hot spare because I want to be able to leave the country for a couple weeks a year and be (almost) certain that even three disk failures won’t mean I need to stay abroad for the rest of my life!

[Olliedawg]

Two physical hosts. Each with very similar setup.

 

x2 Sata SSD's running in RAID1 (boot to esxi on these)

 

X amount of disks running in RAID6 for storage pools

[Jcx500]

Majority of our servers are esx hosts (150+) so they just have a raid one + SAN

 

Any remaining physicals have a raid 1 for OS and raid 6 for storage if needed.

[DavR]

Our main production server is RAID1 on two SSDs for the OS, and RAID5 on spinning disks for the main data storage array. VMs then sit on that, configs on the RAID1 and storage on the RAID5.

 

I used to just do a System and Data drive on a RAID5 or RAID10 array on servers years ago, but that was pre-SSD when there wasn't such a marked difference in performance of drives available, and pre-VMs.

[Hoyt]

We've always run some sort of RAID and it's saved us a lot of downtime. If a disk fails we can replace it without taking anything down. As others have mentioned backups are an important as well. We've always used RAID and off site as well as on site backups. Shadow copies on our file servers have saved me TONS of time over the years restoring user's files. To keep disk activity from getting too sporty I set the shadow copy intervals to just two or three times a week.

 

On our AD servers it's usually RAID 5 with the spinning disk models. We have six AD servers so we haven't felt the need to go more robust than that.

 

On our file servers lately it's been the OS on a mirrored SSD RAID 1 array and RAID 6 on the spinning disks.

[CraigM]

We don't use traditional hardware RAID here anymore. Both of our current servers have a 500GB NVME boot disk. Main DC & file server then has 4 x 2TB SATA SSD and 2 x 4TB SATA HDD configured in Storage Spaces as a tiered mirror. Yeah we lose half the capacity, but our storage needs aren't extreme at this point. Our 2nd server that is hosting VM's has 2 x 2TB SATA SSD's in a Storage Space spanned volume.

 

Software defined storage is the way pretty much the whole industry has decided to go. Hardware RAID isn't dead yet, but it's not going to get any better either.

[SPM99]

I mirror the host disks for the OS and then RAID 10 for the main array. 

[k-strider]

Same with me Mirror for OS and RAID10 for any data volumes

[andy_nic]

Mirror for the OS and RAID 6 for Data, i think after looking between RAID 6 and  RAID 10, i decided it was close but RAID 6 won for me as it can have 2 drive failures and keeping the storage i needed and i have seen this happen to a domain controller 2 drives with 5mins.  However i am also looking at Storage spaces direct for a Hyper-V cluster. 

Edited March 27, 2025 by andy_nic
added extra information

[PotNoodleTech]

Raid 6 on anything with large spinning rust drives (backup servers etc) to allow for 2 drive faliures at at a time with resonable read and write speed (you could also use Riad 10 if you don't mind losing extra space)

2 x SSDs in Raid 1 on O/Ss

SSD storage I still very unfashionably use Raid 5 in order to allow for one drive faliure at a time, significantly improve longevity of each drive (due to FAR less writes compared to Raid 6/60/Raid 10)

 

You may lambast me at will

[mavhc]

Raidz1 which is zfs for raid 5, without the memory hole problem

[k-strider]

raid 0 all the way 😉

[ITGuyNW]

On 28/03/2025 at 08:28, PotNoodleTech said:

Raid 6 on anything with large spinning rust drives (backup servers etc) to allow for 2 drive faliures at at a time with resonable read and write speed (you could also use Riad 10 if you don't mind losing extra space)

2 x SSDs in Raid 1 on O/Ss

SSD storage I still very unfashionably use Raid 5 in order to allow for one drive faliure at a time, significantly improve longevity of each drive (due to FAR less writes compared to Raid 6/60/Raid 10)

 

You may lambast me at will

This is what I do. 

 

RAID 5 for OS

 

RAID 6 for stuff like backups

 

Another question is how many drives do put in your RAID? I stick to 6 max if I can.

Edited March 31, 2025 by ITGuyNW

[supportman]

Never used raid after having a RAID card failure early in my career. 

 

Basically we use fast virtualised machines on SSD drives with daily backups to veeam.

[mavhc]

Yeah, don't use hardware raid unless you have £10k servers, software raid is much better

[PotNoodleTech]

2 hours ago, supportman said:

Never used raid after having a RAID card failure early in my career. 

 

So..out of interest if you had a server fail would you never buy another server again and install everthing on the PCs instead?

 

If your car broke down would you never buy another car?

 

Just wondering as raid card faliure is pretty darn rare - never had one myself in 24 years of doing this.