Disc layout strategy

[Ritmo2k]

I have a few HP DL380's with 8 internal bays. I need to bring on more storage and unfortunately external storage is not an option. Historically I have had good success with 4 disc R10 arrays and I keep one hot spare so these servers all have 5 bays in use. They have plenty memory and cpu however disc will soon become a bottle neck with all vms on the same set of spindles. With two arrays of R10, I loose a hotspare so in this situation what might be an optimal approach here?

Thanks!

[virtualg_uk · Accepted solution]

If you are stuck with only 8 bays and cannot use DAS via PCI RAID card etc then you have some options:

• If your issue is performance then look to move to SSDs
• If space is your bottleneck then look to change RAID type to perhaps R5/6. Obvious performance hit here.
• If your issue is both space and performance then perhaps larger disks with a faster spindle speed however IOPS will increase better with more spindles. Larger SSDs would probably be your best option to meet both requirements.

Not much more I can suggest if you are fixed to the 8 bays and have no ability to add extra disks via DAS/slots