I am about to retask a 2950 to consolidate some VM's on to a single ESXi server. The server is as follows
- Dell 2950
- 2x Intel X5365 @ 3.0Ghz
- 16GB RAM (8x 2GB ECC)
- 2x 73GB 10k SAS
- 4 x 300GB 10K SAS
My question is whether I should go with RAID1/RAID10 or RAID1/RAID1/RAID1?
The VM's are as follows:
- MOSS front end for 100 users
- MOSS SQL backend for 100 users
- IIS Website very low traffic
- TOMCAT website very low traffic
- CRM Application that sync contacts between our Exchange and ERP servers also not a brute
Any advice on what to put where to get the best performance out of MOSS would be appreciated.
Please note this is the only hardware I have available, we have a very tight budget and can't buy another server to host SQL so it has to stay virtualized.
Edit: Database is read intensive, very few writes. I think this helps the all RAID1 position
Answer
I'd definitely go with three RAID 1 volumes; the usable space is the same (50% of total disks size), but you can choose to place VMs on different arrays,and when two VMs are each one on its own physical disk(s) they perform a lot faster than when they're spread across one big array only.
I'd then place the VMs like this:
First array: OS, IIS, tomcat
Second array: MOSS front-end, CRM
Third array: MOSS back-end
Depending on your workload, you can place them differently; but having a fully dedicated array for the most disk-intensive VM will surely provide a benefit.
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