[Mr_Roboto]

So, it looks like I'm going to be getting a shelf of 15 disks and hooking them into a Linux server. They're 15,000 RPM fiber channel 73G. I've been thinking about how I want to carve them (for virtual machines) so I've been debating the following configurations:
-RAID 10 with a hot spare
-3 RAID 5s (3X5)
-1 RAID 5 of 5 disks and a RAID 10 of 10 disks
-RAID 50 of the RAID 5s
-?????
End goal will be virtual machines and likely some data base. I may run LVM on top as well due to it having some nice features available (snapshotting, think volumes etc.) Any thoughts? I'm looking for a good balance of capacity, performance and reliability.

 

[Astrofarian]

YOU'RE the guy most of us read to sort out OUR ideas/issues...LoL. Seriously...I DO hope that SOMEONE here understands half of the stuff in your post and can help you along with this. No help, I know, but HATE seeing un-answered posts. Good luck with this!

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Well, have been messing around with this some still no decisions but it does work. I've pulled some pretty absurd numbers off in reads and not so absurd when writing. This is what I'm seeing. Yeah that's 2GBPS on EXT4. I'm not sure why it's doing it but it is.

XFS:

[[email protected] mnt]# dd of=/dev/null if=/mnt/file.out bs=4096 count=2438096
2438096+0 records in
2438096+0 records out
9986441216 bytes (10 GB) copied, 28.0252 s, 356 MB/s
[[email protected] mnt]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/file.out bs=4096 count=2438096
2438096+0 records in
2438096+0 records out
9986441216 bytes (10 GB) copied, 35.3257 s, 283 MB/s

[[email protected] mnt]# dd of=/dev/null if=./file.out
195047680+0 records in
195047680+0 records out
99864412160 bytes (100 GB) copied, 301.188 s, 332 MB/s

EXT4:

[[email protected] /]# mount /dev/md3p1 /mnt
[[email protected] /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/file.out bs=4096 count=2438096
2438096+0 records in
2438096+0 records out
9986441216 bytes (10 GB) copied, 37.5096 s, 266 MB/s
[[email protected] /]# dd of=/dev/null if=/mnt/file.out bs=4096 count=2438096
2438096+0 records in
2438096+0 records out
9986441216 bytes (10 GB) copied, 5.11039 s, 2.0 GB/s

 

[Drummernaut]

From what I have read and serviced, RAID 10 is your best bet for performance, reliability and redundancy. http://www.howtogeek.com/162676/how-to- ... d=noscript

RAID 10 was used mostly at Target and Kmart stores. The Kmarts were "HOT Swappable".

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Drummer:INTERESTING. Who'd you work for? I'm rolling with EMC these days, sounds like it may be an IBM/HP engagement.

I'm thinking I'm going to look into a pair of 240GB SSDs in retrospect, the reasoning is fairly simple in that this thing calculated out to $25/mo to run and I can probably pay for them in under 8 months if I get a good Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal.