CX3-10C - 2 ESX hosts and 1 Exchange mailbox role

[newtoallthisstu]

Hello again, I'm awaiting our new CX3-10C with a single DAE (5x3009x1461x300HS) scheduled to be delivered within the next two weeks.

I'm looking for some DELL/EMC PROs advices on what RAID level and how big LUNs to start with, I'm not asking you to do the job for me, but just some simple advices, I'd really like to read YOUR best practices with this configuration.

I'll have a total of about 400GBs VMDKs from 12VMs running balanced across two ESX hosts, and a mailbox instance of Exchange Server 2007 STD hosting 300 mailboxes (server software is on physical hardware with local 2x73-15k RAID1 where maybe transaction logs could be stored) sized at 300GB. Someone around writes about metaluns across 2 raid groups, i'm quite sure there aren't much performances improvements in running a metalun on a single DAE, but I might be wrong..

So I though about creating these RGs:

• 5x146 RAID5 = 584GB (minus FlareOS - low I/O VMs)

• 4x146 RAID5 = 438GB (Exchange mailbox database LUN)

• 5x300 RAID5 = 1200GB (VMs - 2xVMFS LUNs)

• 1x300GB - global hot spare

What are your suggestions?

thank you very much

[whynotq]

I think with the limitations you have with the single DAE that you have your configuration already. as for the Meta-LUN question, I wouldn't bother with what you have, I use them with CX3-40 0r 3-80 (or CX5/7) where we have a second backend bus available and can then meta over groups of drives not only in seperate enclosures but also on seperate buses.

[jygoman]

the only thing i would do different is to change where the exchange luns from raid5 to raid10 for faster throughput IO ops. everything else is fine.

[mcwill]

plus you won't lose a disk due to raid5 config.

Pardon?

Do you want to rethink that?

[jygoman]

ops sorry i was thinking the other way around.:0