Test Lab: HP DL 580 G5 128 MB RAM (DAS Storage)

[Stuarty1874]

Can anyone help us out here with suggestions on how best we configure our storage on our new test lab?

We have the following piece of hardware...

HP DL 380 G5

8 x 30GB SAS 10k drives

128 MB RAM

4 x Quad Core 2.93 mhz

Smart P400 Controller

We are thinking about a disk configuration of...

RAID 1+0 for o/s and some low spc VM's

RAID 5 for the remaining disk to host all the other VM's (Mostly w2k3)

I know that a higher spec controller would be nice but we don't have it available.

I've thought about RAID 6 for the VM's but I'm worried about perfomance.

Its for a test lab that will be used for functional testing and won't see a huge amount of load.

Anyone got any views on how we may configure the DAS.

[AntonVZhbankov]

If you're giong to use ESX, then 2 disks in a mirror for ESX itself, and all others in RAID5.

ESXi can be installed on USB flash and then you put all 8 disks to RAID, increasing available space.

You're pretty low on disk space as for my opinion.

Did you really mean 128GB RAM?

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Stuarty1874]

Yes. Using ESX 3.5 and 128MB RAM

[AntonVZhbankov]

ESX won't even install on machine with 128 MB RAM

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Stuarty1874]

... whats the maximum amount of RAM a hsot will take?

[Stuarty1874]

Ha ha... I meant 128GB RAM.

Was doing two things at one here!

256GB RAM is the max.

Apologies!

[AntonVZhbankov]

So you will be very short in disk space with so powerful host.

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Stuarty1874]

I put the orginal post together way too quickly....

We have 300GB SAS drives

128GB RAM