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cubemedia
Contributor
Contributor

Performance with no RAID

Hello

I have a quad core server, 16gb ram and  4 HD, No hardware RAID.

The thing is that i need to run 3 VMS on that machine, one of them been windows.

Since i dont have a hardware RAID and ESXi doesnt support software RAID, i was thinking on creating the VM HD on separate Datastore and use the 4th HD as a backup.

So, i know RAID10 would be the ideal setup, but i dont have that RAID card needed. so do you guys think that will have a decent performance doing it that way?

What i will run is

1 VM -  Windows 2k8 R2 Web, SQL 2k8 R2 Web

1 VM - LAMP

1 VM - linux dev

There is other alternatives to achieve this, like using kvm, but I really like the easy way to manage it via ESXi.

before you guys sugest me to buy a RAID card, it is out of my posibilities right now.

Thanks in advance for your imputs.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the Community - The performance you will receive is going to dpend on the i/o each VM will be requiring - if there is not a high I/O load you should be ok with each VM running on seperate disks -

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cubemedia
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks weinstein5,
Last night I made the installation and everything went just fine..
All 3 vms are running quite stable and fast. more than i expected.
I have almost 15gb ram asigned between those 3 vm. leaving 1gb for the system.
I think the host is performing fine.. Smiley Happy what you think?
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PUREJOY
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi

I see the machine is relatively quiet (based on cpu utilization) and i see max 49msec read latency (which is huge), under heavy load your single disk is going to max out its IOPS and huge latencies will result in poor application peformance. By doing raid you are getting the collective IOPs of all the disk drives and adding a layer of redundacy (if you choose RAID01/10 or RAID5). I am not saying that would solve the IOPS and latency problem but it won't be as bad as single disk mapping that you have done in your case.

Architect @ Pure Storage || www.purestorage.com || http://www.purestorage.com/blog/ || http://twitter.com/#!/purestorage ||@ravivenk || VCAP-DCA5, VCP 4, VCP 5
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cubemedia
Contributor
Contributor

Hello purejoy..

Right now they have a maximum of 6 and average 0.5 , 0.6

I was probably installing Cpanel on that Datastore at that time.

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