RAID 5/6 VSAN

[vSohill]

Hi,

What is the different between number of failures to tolerate and RAID 6 which is available on All-flash VSAN ?

in Hypred VSAN I can configure number of failures to tolerate is 2 or 3 Is the same when I am using RAID-6 ?

[jhague · Accepted solution]

‌Hi - RAID 5 allows 1 failure and requires at least 4 hosts, RAID 6 tolerates 2 failures and requires at least 6 hosts. The difference between these and using RAID 1 (mirroring) is that these methods spread out the virtual disk across a number of physical disks and uses parity information so that the image can be rebuilt in the event a physical disk is lost. By contrast, RAID 1 keeps and identical copy of the data for each failure you wish to allow for - e.g. 2 copies to allow for 1 failure, 3 copies to allow for 2 etc.

Basically RAID 1 will use more capacity than RAID 5 or 6 to achieve the same level of protection but there is a performance overhead due to the parity calculations.

[vSohill]

Thank you