HP DL 380 server Raid Configuration

Ensure the raid controllers cache is battery backed for raid 5, but apart from that yes.

They ask "where". In the ACU which you run under the maintenance section of the SmartStart CD that should have come with it. When you assign the spare don't forget to assign it to both arrays. After making the arrays you make logical disks on them again using the ACU.

And as mentioned above your RAID 5 performance will be poor unless you buy a cache battery.

wow - 8 300GB - over the lifetime of your server, you'll be happier with RAID 10 - partitioned for the OS and whatever other partitions you need.

can i go with 146*2 for OS and other 6 300 GB for other partition or should i go with all 300 gb having 300*2 for OS and other 6 for other partition?
kindly advice

what are you using the server for?

for exchange and exctive directory only

sorry mistyped
 for exchange and active directory only

plz advice

how many exchange users?


will it also be a file server?

approx 55
no not as file server

k - are you considering virtual machines?

with some more ram your server could do a lot more. minimum 16GB recommended.  load up with 8 300 raid 10 array. partition host OS, leave the rest for vhd's.

a server 2008 enterprise license would allow you to run 4 virtual machines.

if you don't want to do virtual - go with 146 raid 10 and 6 300's in raid 10. i would also increase RAM - allow 2gb each for OS and AD and 8GB for exchange -

Only 55 users? Assuming you had enough RAM you could run that on just a pair of disks. Just how big mailboxes are they expecting to use?

2 Gb
can i have a link which can help me to create step by step  raid configuration of raid 1 and raid 5 with one hotswipe disk  for this server

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832792.aspx

I will recommend against RAID 5 - everyone eventually has problems losing data.  search 'raid 5 vs raid 10' on google.  

raid 1, raid 10 provide better protection and perform better over the life of your server.

here's the user manual for configuring your raid controller:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00294139/c00294139.pdf

MS document isn't that relevant since it's talking about 7.2K and slower (and less reliable) disks than the 300GB ones that sanjeevkmrs has already bought. Although RAID 10 is superior RAID 5 will do fine for Exchange since they've cut the IOPS down from what it used to need.

55 users 2GB each will sit on a pair of 300GB disks mirrored though, so 2 for the OS/pagefile/logs and general stuff, 2 for the Exchange data and one spare would be fine. Although you can use slower disks for the data it doesn't save you any money in this instance since you would need one spare for each array unless all disks were similar speed.

Huh...

that's interesting...the MS document covers every data storage scenario that is needed for exchange.

it covers every disk type and spindle speed.  it would be wise for an Exchange expert to know that document frontwards and backwards.

The Exchange guy's at TechEd covered data storage in depth - their experience is data storage is their bottleneck.  thus the research on storage configuration

My point was that Exchange 2010 is engineered for slow disks, since these are fast disks RAID 5 rather than RAID 10 is sufficient, not that they need enough space to justift more than RAID 1 anyway.

Thanks