Storage Planing ESX, iSCSI, SQL

[boirsd]

Hello.

I am planing my ESX infrastructure now and I need some help/advice configuring storage.

The configuration is this :

I have 2 esx servers, each ESX have 4VM's.

ESX1 has > 1 SQL, 2 web servers, 1 TMG.

ESX 2 has > 1 SQL, 2 web servers, 1 vcenter.

SQL and web servers are in HA.

I have an iSCSI storage with 10 disks + one hotspare. Now my question is about configuring RAID.

My plan is this.

2 disks on raid0 for all VM'S C: drive

4 disks RAID10 for SQL data

4 dfisks RAID10 for SQL log files.

Can I achieve this with ESX and iSCSI storage. What do you thing about this configuration ?

[amvmware]

1. Do you know how much IOPS your VM's require - this will assist you in determining the RAID configuration and number of spindles required. The type of disk - FC, SAS or SATA will also affect this figure.

2. If you put all your C: drives on a dedicated set of disks you need to ensure you have sufficient storage capacity on the datastore for the VM snapshots.

3. Your disk design appears to have forgotten about the vCenter, web servers and TMG server - where is their storage requirements coming from?

[boirsd]

Hi amvmware,

1. This will be financial application and max 20 users will work on that application. The disks I have are SAS 15k 146GB.

2. Yes you are right id I put 8 VM's on raid0 146gb datastore it will be not enough.

3. The web server data it's realy small so I was planed to put on RAID10 where database files will be. TMG log files on Sql log raid10 array, for Vcenter I didnt research yet what is the storage requirements.

Any suggestion ?

[amvmware]

I personally would not be approaching it from the available storage capacity.

1. You might find that for the number of VM's and disks sizes you are talking about, one large datastore may meet your needs.

2. You have suggested the disks are 146Gb and you have 10 of them - so you would only have a datastore of a maximum of 1.46Tb anyway and unless these SQL servers are getting really hammered then it may be the better option for you - you only have 8 VM's.

3. Your current proposed soluton could leave you with to much capacity for the DB's and insufficient IO for the other VM's as well as insufficient storage capacity.

You need to understand the disk IO requirements of the VM's.

[boirsd]

Firstly I wanted to put all 10 disk's in one raid10 array , but I have read that the best solution is tu put database and log files on separate physical disks that's way I have gone through thinking about compination of multiple arrays. But considering spice like you told i will get problems with insufficient IO for the other VM's as well as insufficient storage capacity and too much space for DB.

Is good practice to hold all disks in one array raid10 ?

About amount of sql IO operations I will contact with our DB admin to tell me about that, but i thing there will be not too much IO because like a said the application will use max 15 users with adding data about costumers, financial ect..

[amvmware]

The best practises is correct - but we go back to what i have said earlier - is 2 ,4, 6, or 10 disks sufficient to deliver the IO required - i don't know and at the moment you do not know either.

You need to understand the disk IO requirements - RAID 1, 5, 10 or 50 is at the moment guess work.

You need to design your storage solution rather than the guess work you are applying at the moment.

[PduPreez]

Before you get to the RAID setups you need to bed down your iSCSI configuration.

Do you have dedicated NIC's for the Storage side and what speed is it running. This is the most important part

For RAID config it depends what performance you need as previous poster said.

This does not look like the most powerfull SQL servers in the world

I have SQLs running on 2 x 1GiG iSCSI links servicing around 50 users and running well on RAID 5

In my opinion I would create a RAID 5 Volume (10disks + 1 hotspare) and then have 1 Datastore of about 1.4TB usable storage.

Hope it helps

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