HP MSA Storage Planning

[StevieD99]

Hi all,

Please may I have some advice from your previous experiences? We have a MSA2000 g2 (3GB SAS & dual controller) arriving, x12 300GB SAS 15K, using DAS to a HP Blade c-3000. I'll be using 2 BL460 blades (32GB RAM, x2 Xeon QC) for ESXi 3.5. Initially I'll be running 10-12 VM's across these two boxes, ranging from a couple of DC's, low utilized application servers, Exchange & SQL..

My question is, how do I setup storage for best performance for VM's, SQL & Exchange.

Exchange 2007 = 30 users\mailboxes (40GB store), which runs well currently on a RAID-1 array (15K disks). Logs (rarely above 2GB before backup) are another RAID-1 array.

SQL 2000 = 5-10 small DB's, no bigger than 5GB each (only 1 DB has moderate-high use). Runs ok on a RAID-1 array (15K disks) currently. Logs on another RAID-1 array.

Would x2 VMFS RAID-10 LUNs (6 disks for 900GB useable) work well, having the Exchange & SQL servers on separate LUNS, then maybe optimize the paths of servers so they only access the controller that owns the LUN?

The environment here is small (30 users) and RAID-10 will be used, so should I still be concerned about the transaction logs on SQL & Exchange not being on a separate set of disks in this design?

Any other suggestions for 'carving' up my SAN for this environment? Thanks

[azn2kew]

I would create seperate LUNs for logs, database and OSes if possible. RAID 10 for databases + logs, and RAID 5 for all OSes that resides and then using default 128k strip size should be good or 64k is fine too just match to your Windows/controllers. Are you using MSA1000 or MSA2000 series? LUN size between 400-600GB is decent and do not over allocate VMs just between 10-16VMs would be good to reduce iSCSI Reservation and I/O thrashing. I would first analyze the workload before I implement anything. Most database performance issues tie to your storage configurations so RAID 10 is the best and has much better performance then RAID5.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[StevieD99]

I'll be using the MSA 2000 series, the new G2 model (SAS 3GB interface, direct attached storage to c-3000). I had planned two LUN's at 900GB and RAID-10 (using all 12 disks in MSA). Then basically have 5-6 VM's on each LUN - SQL & Exchange on different LUN's. Using VMFS, no RDM etc

So are you saying something like a 4 disk RAID-5 for VM's, 6 disk RAID-10 for DB's and 2 disk for RAID-1 (logs)? That way though, I'd hardly touch the disk space on the RAID-10 (Exchange DB is 40GB and SQL DB's total 30GB)?