Question about SATA raid

I am building a VM box to run a full lab to study for my MCSA / MCSE tests....

I am building a quad core, 8 gig of ram box. The hard drive configuration I have come up with is as follows.

74gb 10k rpm Raptor for OS drive

2 250 gb perp read 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 using the motherboard for speed on the VM's

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128050

C: would be roughly 74 gigs

would read roughly 500 gigs

Now my question is.. this is possible... right? I can run one drive.. the boot drive by it's self. And then run 2 others in RAID 0 via the mobo?

I should know this... however I am limited on my experience with workstation raid.

Thanks for the input.

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Comments

Mishra

"SATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD"

Okay I see the ability to do RAID.

So you could host your OS on the 74gig drive and do a RAID 0 on the 2 250 gig drives.

Thacker

Mishra wrote:

"SATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD"

Okay I see the ability to do RAID.

So you could host your OS on the 74gig drive and do a RAID 0 on the 2 250 gig drives.

So I can basically split the setup to be a single drive, and then raid set up even tho its using the same hard drive controller on the system board..... I might just do that.

I am assuming this is a good plan for basic performance on a VM box. I looking to run 3 servers and 6 - 10 workstations simultaneously.

Smallguy

Thacker wrote:

Mishra wrote:

"SATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD"

Okay I see the ability to do RAID.

So you could host your OS on the 74gig drive and do a RAID 0 on the 2 250 gig drives.

So I can basically split the setup to be a single drive, and then raid set up even tho its using the same hard drive controller on the system board..... I might just do that.

I am assuming this is a good plan for basic performance on a VM box. I looking to run 3 servers and 6 - 10 workstations simultaneously.

just remember the limitation of 32 bit operating systems only being able to recognize 4gb of ram

I think running that many servers and workstations will work but don;t expect anything to be fast

with XP clients you can probably allocate 256mb of ram per OS it'll just me really slow

Thacker

Smallguy wrote:

Thacker wrote:

Mishra wrote:

"SATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD"

Okay I see the ability to do RAID.

So you could host your OS on the 74gig drive and do a RAID 0 on the 2 250 gig drives.

So I can basically split the setup to be a single drive, and then raid set up even tho its using the same hard drive controller on the system board..... I might just do that.

I am assuming this is a good plan for basic performance on a VM box. I looking to run 3 servers and 6 - 10 workstations simultaneously.

just remember the limitation of 32 bit operating systems only being able to recognize 4gb of ram

I think running that many servers and workstations will work but don;t expect anything to be fast

with XP clients you can probably allocate 256mb of ram per OS it'll just me really slow

I won't be doing much in this aside from basic configuration and getting htem to all communicate with one another. I figured 384-512 per workstation, 768 per server.

Pash

Thacker wrote:

Smallguy wrote:

Thacker wrote:

Mishra wrote:

"SATA RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD"

Okay I see the ability to do RAID.

So you could host your OS on the 74gig drive and do a RAID 0 on the 2 250 gig drives.

So I can basically split the setup to be a single drive, and then raid set up even tho its using the same hard drive controller on the system board..... I might just do that.

I am assuming this is a good plan for basic performance on a VM box. I looking to run 3 servers and 6 - 10 workstations simultaneously.

just remember the limitation of 32 bit operating systems only being able to recognize 4gb of ram

I think running that many servers and workstations will work but don;t expect anything to be fast

with XP clients you can probably allocate 256mb of ram per OS it'll just me really slow

I won't be doing much in this aside from basic configuration and getting htem to all communicate with one another. I figured 384-512 per workstation, 768 per server.

You deffinately will not need to allocate that much memory to the xp workstations or server for just basic lab tests. 128mb per xp client is fine, 356mb per server is fine. I run a web and agent based security lab at work with one server (running IIS, AD, DNS, DHCP) and three clients, doesnt even flinch with 2gb of crappy RAM. Make sure you install VMtools on each installation also.

JDMurray

You can run a free 64-bit Linux server OS to support the 8GB hardware and run 32-bit Windows host OSes in the VMWare Server instances. This is a cheaper solution than buying a copy of 64-bit Windows XP or Server 2003/2008--unless you specifically need 64-bit Windows for your MCSE studies.

Thacker

JDMurray wrote:

You can run a free 64-bit Linux server OS to support the 8GB hardware and run 32-bit Windows host OSes in the VMWare Server instances. This is a cheaper solution than buying a copy of 64-bit Windows XP or Server 2003/2008--unless you specifically need 64-bit Windows for your MCSE studies.

Thanksfully I work for a microsoft gold partner so we have volume licensing for most of the products I need to install.

I am going to install server 2003 64 bit as the boot OS because this machine will pull double duty as a home theatre PC.

Do you guys see any problems with running raid 0 on the VM drives?

Would it be better to buy 3 drives and run raid 5?

dynamik

Thacker wrote:

Do you guys see any problems with running raid 0 on the VM drives?

Hardware raid is transparent to the OS and anything running within it. If you get Windows, etc. installed successfully, it's not likely that you'll experience any problems. The only downside about raid 0 is that if you lose one drive, all your data is lost.

Thacker wrote:

Would it be better to buy 3 drives and run raid 5?

It depends on your needs. It will be slightly slower since it will have to calculate parity information, but it provides redundancy where raid 0 does not.

Thacker

The VM files will be backed up nightly to an external hard drive. I don't think I need to worry much about raid 5 then... and I am assuming raid 0 should have a good bit of performance associated with it.

JDMurray

The performance depends upon many factors, including the hard disk speed, disk transfer rate, and the features of the RAID hardware used. 10K RPM SATA-II drives are very good for performance.

If you are using on-board RAID rather than a separate RAID controller, make sure you get a mobo with the RAID chipset that has the best ratio of data transfer rate to CPU utilization. (I'd like to know which RAID chipset is best myself.)