Dell R720 Hyper-V Host RAID Question

I've been fairly spoiled at work with a Nutanix VMware cluster. A co-worker and I are re-purposing a Dell R720 rack server to use as a test-bed for hosting Hyper-V servers.

We were able to scrounge up 192GB of RAM for it. It already has 2 300GB SSD drives. I need to order 6 more drives for storage, we're trying to decide between 3 or 4TB 7200 RPM drives. I have a couple questions:

1. Which RAID configuration would you recommend? 5, 6, 50?

2. Will 3 or 4TB drives be to large to run VMs? Meaning will they be too slow?

Thanks!

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dark3d

I have VMware 5.5 on several R720s. You should post the model of raid controller in it. You should look at controller capabilities before ordering 4tb drives which possibly won't be supported.

matai

dark3d wrote: »

I have VMware 5.5 on several R720s. You should post the model of raid controller in it. You should look at controller capabilities before ordering 4tb drives which possibly won't be supported.

It's the DELL PERC H710P. The vendor says the 4TB drives are compatible, although I'll admit I don't always trust them.

dark3d

Nice. I'm typically dealing with lower end controllers and some of them have a 2tb limit.

wmarow's iops calculator

The link above will help you calculate IOPS. Plug in your drive specs and then toggle between the different raid types. Raid 1+0 will normally be the fastest. Since it's a lab and not production you can get away with less redundancy.

matai

dark3d wrote: »

Nice. I'm typically dealing with lower end controllers and some of them have a 2tb limit.

wmarow's iops calculator

The link above will help you calculate IOPS. Plug in your drive specs and then toggle between the different raid types. Raid 1+0 will normally be the fastest. Since it's a lab and not production you can get away with less redundancy.

Thanks, that's super helpful!

dark3d

Since you have a 710 controller, I'd want to try out a 'CacheCade' with one of those SSDs.

Deathmage

+1 for flash cache if your flavor of Hyper-V supports it.

As far as drives go, if you can 3 4TB'd drives in RAID 5 would be ideal, RAID 6 even better; RAID 10/50 for a test server is completely overkill.