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Tore JacobsenFlag for Norway

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Storage pools vs Raid 10

Storagepools vs Raid 10.
Hi. We are setting up a physical server (not running Hyper-V) to act as a Domain controller and a SQL server.
Plan is to use 8 x 600GB drives (SAS) sat up in Raid 10 (using onboard Raid controller - HP ML 350 Gen10 server)
Divide in 2 partitions C: for Win 2016 and D: for SQL data.

Not familiar with storagepools.
Is an option to use 2 disks in a mirror (created on raid controller and create a Storage Pool in File manager after windows is installed.
Looking for max r\w but also safety in case of disks crashing.

This setup may also be used for single Hyper-V host as well?

Happy for any suggestions
Thanx
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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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I've prefer "old school" hardware RAID 10  HPE Smart Array controller, easier to repair/restore.

Although why your DC is not virtual is another question ?
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Hi and thanx.
Small 10 user dentist office only using\ needing fast SQL access.
Have also sat ut hyper-V with 2 vm's (DC and SQL) but don't seem to get the same speed as with one physical.
Also question of licenses.
A pair of SDD will be much faster and less expensive than 8 HDD in RAID 10.

Don't use Storage Pools.

You should be running as VMs.
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Member_2_231077

Storage Spaces isn't good for fast writes as it has no non-volatile  write cache, So long as you get a model with a storage battery write performance will be good using hardware RAID. Read performance will be similar either way.
This is a DC, not SQL.

A Windows Standard licenses, entitles you to use 2 VMs. (e.g. includes licenses)
Run two VMs as has been suggested.

SQL of any flavour is not supported on a Domain Controller.

I have two very thorough EE articles on all things Hyper-V that are applicable to this situation:

Some Hyper-V Hardware and Software Best Practices
Practical Hyper-V Performance Expectations

Note that a small dentist's office could benefit from the SQL VM being on a pair of SATA SSDs such as the Intel SSD D3-4610 series in RAID 1. There would be more than enough IOPS for that scenario.
Also, I would NOT put the system drive on the same drives as SQL Server. Also, any flavor of SQL Server will benefit best with a minimum of three drives/devices, one for database, one for log and one for tempdb. Since you have space for it, use 8 SSD drives, each configured as RAID 1. Two each for system, database, log and tempdb. TempDB can actually be two drives configured as RAID 0 to give you more space. There is no real reason to have your  tempdb be redundant.
Eight SSD for 10 people running a light SQL program, where they are concerned about license costs for a VM, is IMHO not appropriate. I don't have that many SSD disks for a system running hundreds of interactive users processing millions of transactions per month. We started with 2 SSD, and only added more for capacity reasons.

A pair of SSD if fine. Any more than two should only be for capacity reasons, which is unlikely to be needed.
Hi and thanx for all answers.
So to conclude (don't have SSD drives avaiable now so 8 sata it is)
Instead og making 1 Raid 10 with all 8 drives. Installing Hyper-V and creating 5 vhd (dc and 4 for SQL)
You suggests making 4 mirrors? 1 for hyper-v and DC-vhd, and 3 for SQL? (only have 8 drives)
I'd just make a single array but slice it into a small RAID 10 for Hyper-V OS and the rest as bigger RAID 10 or RAID 6 for the VMs and data. Depends which controller you are getting with the machine though.
The best way to get maximum throughput and IOPS is to set up all disks in a single array and then have two logical/virtual disks set up on that array.

A single disk is about 150MiB/Second or 250 to 450 IOPS depending on the storage stack configuration.

A set of RAID 1 pairs would perform very poorly.
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kevinhsieh
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