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msidnamFlag for United States of America

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New ESXi host with internal SSD Hard drives. Best way to configure for local storage

We've recently purchased a new server with 3 400GB SSD drives  and 12 600GB 15K drives. Our goal is to create a few VM's running terminal server (or RDS as its called now) for our in house users.

When creating the RAID I was wondering what is the best option? I used to do a mirror drive for the OS and then a RAID 10 for the data. however, I want to be able to utilize the SSD's in the best way possible and I'm not sure if ESXi/vCenter automatically takes advantage of them. We are on 5.1


We will be using Windows Server 2012 when we build the RDS servers.
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Be very careful RAIDing SSDs, most think if Admins, RAID them in the same way as RAIDING magnetic disks, you'll get exceptional performance.

This is not always the case, and some times they can perform poorly.

I would experiment as to what performance suits your environment.

Do you want resilience or performance, e.g. RAID 10 or RAID 6.

Also if you RAID SSDs, you will lose the SSD functions, presented to the ESXi server, as it will no longer recognise them as SSDs.

So, do you want to use SSD features in the host ?

Flash Cache, Swap to Cache ?
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ASKER

I would like both (resilience and performance) but i realize i can't always have my cake and eat it to.

I think in this particular instance, performance is key. The reason I say that is because we bought 3 servers like this, so if one goes down, we can push users to one of the other two remaining servers. since we are going to be utilizing local storage and not a SAN, I'm hoping we get some more performance going that route as well.

I am not familiar with Flash cache or swap to cache. doing a quick search, it looks like Flash cache is only available for 5.5?

Our main goal is to give the users who will be on the RDS servers the best possible experience that we can. I know it won't be perfect (we have many apps that will also cause some slow down) but we want to squeeze the most we can out of it.
I would experiment, with different RAID types, this question has been asked many times, why are my four SSDs performing poorly?

So RAID 10 or RAID 6.
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My initial thoughts were to create a RAID 10 with the 600GB 15K disks where i will put the VM's. Then using vCenter i was going to see if i could utilize the SSD's for I/O. but it looks like i can't unless i go to 5.5 and use the flash Cache.

we dont need the swap to cache as these servers have 384GB of ram.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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