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Raid 5 5.8 TB Partitions or no Partitions
Dell shipped me a 5.8TB useable space Raid 5 configuration with server partitions. Do I need those partitions. I have a 2012 standard server and I'm going to run at least 2 vm's. Maybe 2 more. I don't want to be limited by partitions, can I delete these partitions (is that best practice?) IS there a size limit?
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I would always partition your drives, as it simplifies things a lot. For example if a chkdsk needs to be done, it'll finish faster on small partitions than large ones (and such a chkdsk can take hours to finish, if not days), and during that time those partitions are offline and not usable.
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Would chkdsk be the only reason not too? If I have 4 vm's can't they do chkdsk on each vm?
That's only one reason. I usually like to have separate partitions so that the type of data or whatever is on them can be organized better.
The chkdsk you do for the VM's you'd be doing inside the virtual file-system of that VM, but the virtual file-system is a file on the host file-system, so the chkdsk you'd do on the host tests the host file-system.
The chkdsk you do for the VM's you'd be doing inside the virtual file-system of that VM, but the virtual file-system is a file on the host file-system, so the chkdsk you'd do on the host tests the host file-system.
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so leave the size of the partitions, isn't the C drive a little to big? one vm I'll be putting in sql and Great plains.
Depends on what you'll have on C:.
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Be careful with the partitions bigger that 2 TB. Hyper-V 2012 supports them a repository for VHDX files but you won’t be able to create the old VHD files or import virtual machines created in Hyper-V 2008.
Baloney! vhd files are limited in size to 2TB. This does not mean that the DRIVE that the file (.vhd) goes onto is limited to 2TB.. I've used a 12TB Storage Array with no problems to store vhd's.
It looks like dell has it about right.. The limit of a MBR partition is 2.2TB.. Surprised that you are seeing the RAID5 volume as separate disks.
Baloney! vhd files are limited in size to 2TB. This does not mean that the DRIVE that the file (.vhd) goes onto is limited to 2TB.. I've used a 12TB Storage Array with no problems to store vhd's.
It looks like dell has it about right.. The limit of a MBR partition is 2.2TB.. Surprised that you are seeing the RAID5 volume as separate disks.
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