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Bill H

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Vmware SSD question

hey guys,

I have a supermicro server with SSD drives in Raid-5. I installed esx 5.5 on there, but when i connected via vsphere to check my datastore, it showed drive type as non-ssd. How do i make sure vmware sees these as SSD?
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Your RAID storage controller is "masking" the drives as SSDs to VMware vSphere, when you have created the RAID set.

Also note your performance of RAIDing SSDs may not be as expected!

You may be able to use my EE Article to "fake the drives" as SSD
(these also work with ESXi 5.5!)

HOW TO: Tag and Configure a storage device as a Solid State Disk (SSD) in VMware vSphere 5.0 or 5.1  (ESXi 5.0 or ESXi 5.1)

HOW TO: Configure Host Cache Configuration for your VMware vSphere 5.0 or 5.1 ESXi (5.0 or 5.1) Host Server

What do you want to do with the SSDs, what features do you want to enable?
Avatar of Bill H
Bill H

ASKER

Just trying to get the most performance, andrew what do your recommend?
In that case it does not matter whether ESXi OS detects the disks as SSDs.

You may find it faster in you break the RAID and present each SSD individually to the ESXi host.
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

I need RAID for redundancy.

Anything else i should look into on VMWARE for better performance?
If you want redundancy you will need to leave the disks as RAID 5.

Whether it states SSD or NOT, it will still use the datastore "as is", and because you have no latency, it will be faster, because it's using SSDs.

See this other question, which is a similar question about SSDs and ESXi 5.5.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28591761/How-to-speed-up-local-ESXi-storage-with-SSD-read-write-cache-or-RAM-cache.html
Raid5 on SSDs are bad on so many levels
Why not take a pair of them and use software mirroring

(Yes capacity may be an issue.  Or get a controller and mechanical hdd that is in the HCL)
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

why is it bad?
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

Should i go with Raid 10 then?
RAID 10 would be better, but performance is probably not what you would expect.

Try RAID 1.
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

Raid 1 or Raid 10?? I have 4x 480Gb SSD's
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

i do need redundancy.
R1, and if you really cared about performance ...and this is transactional DB then do vmdirect and software mirroring on two Of the ssds
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

i do care about performance, but i wouldnt have enough space to set it up that way.
The correct place for SSDs is tempDB, scratch index files, and the O/S.   Everything doesn't have to be the same capacity.  Get two low capacity HDD or SSD for the OS and this stuff, along with swap, and then larger devices for everything else.
Avatar of Bill H

ASKER

i really want to know how "bad" ssd is with raid5.
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David
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