Server setup - best practise for RAID on new server - opinions?
I might be old school in my thinking but I was about to supply a client a server running Windows Server 2008.
I was going to setup a C drive with Mirrored RAID (1)
And then a D drive with raid 5 where the majority of data will be kept?
The server will be running MSSQL not exchange. It will be the only server on a network of 10.
Is this still the good way to do things? Or should I just make the entire partiation RAID 5.
Will be using SCSI disks.
I was going to setup a C drive with Mirrored RAID (1)
And then a D drive with raid 5 where the majority of data will be kept?
The server will be running MSSQL not exchange. It will be the only server on a network of 10.
Is this still the good way to do things? Or should I just make the entire partiation RAID 5.
Will be using SCSI disks.
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Subhashish Laha
This approach will be good.
SQL best practices would be 2 disks mirrored for OS/binaries/pagefile, 2 mirrored for transaction logs, two mirrored for TempDB and the rest in RAID 10 for data but that ends up as a lot of disks. It really depends on what you're throwing at it, if it's low write then the transaction logs can go on the disks that have the OS on and you can use RAID 5 instead of 10 for the data and have TempDB on the data disks. Or you might have high enough IOPS requirement and low enough data size to use SSDs.
I would avoid having transaction logs on the OS disks. There is nothing worse than having a system that will not allow you to logon because the system disk is full. The solution by andyalder seems to be overkill for a server on a network of 10 machines.
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I don't think it's going tobe that heavy hit. It will be 5 MSSQL users via Sage 200 applicaiton. Should not be too intensive.
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Point taken about two partitions in the system disks..
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I just looked up a bit more about RAID 10. Look s interesting.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/
But bascially if I buy say 1TB of disk, that leaves me with 500GB useable right?
Or is it even less then that?
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/
But bascially if I buy say 1TB of disk, that leaves me with 500GB useable right?
Or is it even less then that?
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OK thanks. Sorry for the delay. That is what I meant with the disks. So actually in reality it is more likely to be
4 * 450GB SAS hard drives.
So with RAID 10 this would give me about 900GB of useable space and I would have both the C and D partiations setup only logically across these volumes.
With RAID 5 I would have more storage right as I would have something closer to 1.2GB.
So the downsize of RAID 10 is that it costs more in disk space.
4 * 450GB SAS hard drives.
So with RAID 10 this would give me about 900GB of useable space and I would have both the C and D partiations setup only logically across these volumes.
With RAID 5 I would have more storage right as I would have something closer to 1.2GB.
So the downsize of RAID 10 is that it costs more in disk space.
Yes, if you have 4 disks you will have nominally 1 drive (450 GB) less capacity using RAID 10 vs RAID 5.
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All very good comments. Many thanks for the input on this.