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RAID Configuration On HP Proliant DL360 G7 ?

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Hello,

I am planning the hard drive installation for a server rebuild. I plan to use raid 5 on as many volumes as possible but since the server only has 8 2.5″ SAS drive bays, there is only the possibility for 2 RAID 5 setups and then space for an additional raid 0 or 1.

I will be installing server 2008 64 with Hyper-V as a host for 2 other virtual machine installs of server 2008 64 (so 3 server os installations in total).

I want to install 2008 on one raid 5 volume (that’s 3 of my bays gone) and then I want to create 2 more raid 5 volumes, one for each of my virtual machines. I will be installing the virtual hard disk files of the virtual machines each on their own volume, each volume created from one of the raid 5 setups. This way they will have their own dedicated raid 5 array which hopefully will give good performance while having a bit of fault tolerance.

So my problem is that I don’t have enough bays for my plan. I do not have any experience of using seperate rack mounted nas drives with raid controllers. Can I add an enclosure to the rack that can take at least 3 more drives (would be desirable to add expandability for 6 more drives as I need to add a further general network storage volume later)? What are my options in connecting this with the G7 server? Will it use a SAS (scsi) bus from the server or should it be seperate with it’s own raid controller and be accessed through the network? Which will have better performance, linking the new raid enclosure to the existing server or having it as a stand alone nas solution accessed though its own network interface?

Also, since the 2.5″ sas drives are expensive, would be good to get something that can take the cheaper 3.5″ (as long as they are 10k rpm), I’m saying this assuming that the only disadvantage of the 3.5″ 10k sas drives is the size?

Can the raid controller in the HP DL360 G7 (P410i) even support 3 raid setups?

Would be brilliant to get answers to my millions of questions.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. You have 8 SAS drives

    If it were me, I’d use two drives in a RAID 1 for the operating system. That leaves you 6 drives, enough for two RAID 5’s containing 3 disks each.

    NEVER use RAID 0, it has no redundancy.

    Can the raid controller in the HP DL360 G7 (P410i) even support 3 raid setups?

    RTFM – that means, Read The Freaking Manual

    I say that because the manual will contain this type of info. Oh and don’t tell me the dog ate your manual because anybody with half a brain knows you’ll be able to find it on the internet.

    It matters not how straight the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
    I am the master of my fate;
    I am the captain of my soul.

    ***William Henley***

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