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Thanks to both. &nbsp;I gave aldanch a touch more for correcting me on the RAID 1+0 capacity.
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Thanks to both.  I gave aldanch a touch more for correcting me on the RAID 1+0 capacity.

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I am setting up a new Dell R710 with the following specs:<br />
2x E5504 procs, 16gb Ram, 8x 146gb 10k SAS drives, ESXi.<br />
It will be running the latest version of ESXi, and will host (at the outset) 2 VM. &nbsp;The first VM will be Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 for 20 users. &nbsp;The second VM will be either my web server (Server 2003 with Blackberry BES) or PGP Universal Server (WebMessenger). &nbsp;I was planning on giving Exchange 8gb of ram, and then 2gb to the webserver, leaving some for future growth of the server.<br />
<br />
My question is this - what's the best RAID configuration for throughput. &nbsp;ESXi is embedded so the disks will be just for the VM's. &nbsp;Should I do one of the following:<br />
<br />
Raid 1+0 (I think this will give me ~296gb of storage), but no separation of OS and databases<br />
Raid 1 (2 disks) for OS, Raid 5 (5 disks) for databases, 1 hot spare<br />
Raid 5 with 1 or 2 hot spares<br />
Or something completely different?<br />
<br />
Thanks for the help!
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I am setting up a new Dell R710 with the following specs:
2x E5504 procs, 16gb Ram, 8x 146gb 10k SAS drives, ESXi.
It will be running the latest version of ESXi, and will host (at the outset) 2 VM.  The first VM will be Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 for 20 users.  The second VM will be either my web server (Server 2003 with Blackberry BES) or PGP Universal Server (WebMessenger).  I was planning on giving Exchange 8gb of ram, and then 2gb to the webserver, leaving some for future growth of the server.

My question is this - what's the best RAID configuration for throughput.  ESXi is embedded so the disks will be just for the VM's.  Should I do one of the following:

Raid 1+0 (I think this will give me ~296gb of storage), but no separation of OS and databases
Raid 1 (2 disks) for OS, Raid 5 (5 disks) for databases, 1 hot spare
Raid 5 with 1 or 2 hot spares
Or something completely different?

Thanks for the help!

Raid configuration in new ESXi/Exchang machine

The Microsoft Server topic includes all of the legacy versions of the operating system, including the Windows NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and Windows Home Server versions.

Microsoft Server OS

Exchange is the server side of a collaborative application product that is part of the Microsoft Server infrastructure. Exchange's major features include email, calendaring, contacts and tasks, support for mobile and web-based access to information, and support for data storage.

Exchange

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.