Server 2012 R2 Storage Options (Thinking RAID-5 with tiered storage?)

[vanwazltoff]

Tried asking some questions about my build in New Builds and Planning section with more info and the mods I am making etc, but seems like everyone in that section only cares about making gaming rigs so all of my server questions were basically ignored and my post was hardly even viewed, so now I am here instead.

 

So I bought a used rack mount 1U server, I am currently doing mods to it (removing the internal 40mm fans with 80mm external fans to cut noise down.)

 

The server has 2x quad core Xeon processors and 16gb of DDR2 ECC, it came with 2x 74gb SAS drives which I am not sure what i'll do with yet, probably use them for VMs.

 

I have a question about storage, I am thinking about going with RAID-5 (technically its just called parity in 2012 R2)  for redundancy and slightly better speed. I have 2x 2TB drives and I'll get a 3rd to complete the array, but Server 2012 R2 supports tiering with SSDs if you use a storage pool. So I was thinking that I could possibly use 3x 2tb drives and a 240gb SSD (I have one laying around) and I could partition the SSD to use half for the operating system and half for a higher tier in the storage pool for more frequently used data. Would this work? I know Storage Pool requirements are a bit different than Windows Disk Management, not sure if 3x 2TB drives and one partitioned SSD are enough for tiered parity set up. Anyone have advise or experience with this?

 

Another option is using FlexRAID, which I know little about.

 

Purposes for this server include:

PXE OS deployment (testing and practical applications)

Using it as a file server

Active directory practicing 

Print server

DNS

DHCP

SQL

Virtualization

Server clustering

Remote operation

Learning Powershell server commands

etc.

 

Basically I am going to use this for practicing enterprise level computing...at a very small scale.

[Captain_WD]

 

Tried asking some questions about my build in New Builds and Planning section with more info and the mods I am making etc, but seems like everyone in that section only cares about making gaming rigs so all of my server questions were basically ignored and my post was hardly even viewed, so now I am here instead.

 

So I bought a used rack mount 1U server, I am currently doing mods to it (removing the internal 40mm fans with 80mm external fans to cut noise down.)

 

The server has 2x quad core Xeon processors and 16gb of DDR2 ECC, it came with 2x 74gb SAS drives which I am not sure what i'll do with yet, probably use them for VMs.

 

I have a question about storage, I am thinking about going with RAID-5 (technically its just called parity in 2012 R2)  for redundancy and slightly better speed. I have 2x 2TB drives and I'll get a 3rd to complete the array, but Server 2012 R2 supports tiering with SSDs if you use a storage pool. So I was thinking that I could possibly use 3x 2tb drives and a 240gb SSD (I have one laying around) and I could partition the SSD to use half for the operating system and half for a higher tier in the storage pool for more frequently used data. Would this work? I know Storage Pool requirements are a bit different than Windows Disk Management, not sure if 3x 2TB drives and one partitioned SSD are enough for tiered parity set up. Anyone have advise or experience with this?

 

Another option is using FlexRAID, which I know little about.

 

Purposes for this server include:

PXE OS deployment (testing and practical applications)

Using it as a file server

Active directory practicing 

Print server

DNS

DHCP

SQL

Virtualization

Server clustering

Remote operation

Learning Powershell server commands

etc.

 

Basically I am going to use this for practicing enterprise level computing...at a very small scale.

 

 

 

Hey vanwazltoff,

 

This sounds like a great idea. According to Microsoft's website you should not have any problems doing that (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn789160.aspx). You might have some drawbacks from using the same drive for the OS as well as for tiering and notice some slower speeds. I would leave 60GB for the OS and leave everything else for tiering as you might need to expand it at some point and shrinking the OS partition is not recommended at all.

As for the HDDs, what drives are you planning on using? I would advice you to get similar drives from the same manufacturer taht are the same model and have same firmware and features. The more different the drives, the more likely they are to drop out of the RAID array. I could suggest checking out WD Red drives as they are designed and tuned specifically for NAS/RAID environments, have NASware 3.0 software that enables them to run more smoothly and securely in such environments. Here's a link: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=sPrzmv. 

 

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

 

Captain_WD.

[vanwazltoff]

 

Hey vanwazltoff,

 

This sounds like a great idea. According to Microsoft's website you should not have any problems doing that (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn789160.aspx). You might have some drawbacks from using the same drive for the OS as well as for tiering and notice some slower speeds. I would leave 60GB for the OS and leave everything else for tiering as you might need to expand it at some point and shrinking the OS partition is not recommended at all.

As for the HDDs, what drives are you planning on using? I would advice you to get similar drives from the same manufacturer taht are the same model and have same firmware and features. The more different the drives, the more likely they are to drop out of the RAID array. I could suggest checking out WD Red drives as they are designed and tuned specifically for NAS/RAID environments, have NASware 3.0 software that enables them to run more smoothly and securely in such environments. Here's a link: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=sPrzmv. 

 

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

 

Captain_WD.

 

Drives I currently have:

1 Sandisk Extreme 120gb (currently in desktop)

1 Sandisk Extreme 2 240gb (currently used as external HDD)

1 WD Black 2tb (currently in desktop)

1 WD Green 2tb (unused)

2 HP 72gb 15k SAS drives (unused)

 

I planned on removing all drives from my desktop and getting a 480gb SSD (they only cost $200 now), after I remove the bulk data this will be more than enough storage.

Use one of the SSDs I have for the OS/tiering, use the other as an external HDD (can't live without an external SSD after having one for a year)

Buy one more 2tb HDD for a RAID-5 (probably another in the future as a hot spare)

Use the 15k SAS drives for VMs

 

I don't want to poor too much money into this. I got the server for $130, another $30 for mods (so far).

[Captain_WD]

Drives I currently have:

1 Sandisk Extreme 120gb (currently in desktop)

1 Sandisk Extreme 2 240gb (currently used as external HDD)

1 WD Black 2tb (currently in desktop)

1 WD Green 2tb (unused)

2 HP 72gb 15k SAS drives (unused)

 

I planned on removing all drives from my desktop and getting a 480gb SSD (they only cost $200 now), after I remove the bulk data this will be more than enough storage.

Use one of the SSDs I have for the OS/tiering, use the other as an external HDD (can't live without an external SSD after having one for a year)

Buy one more 2tb HDD for a RAID-5 (probably another in the future as a hot spare)

Use the 15k SAS drives for VMs

 

I don't want to poor too much money into this. I got the server for $130, another $30 for mods (so far).

 

 

When doing RAID (including RAID5) all drives downgrade their size, rpm, read/write speed and other features to the slowest drive. In your case, the WD Black will become significantly slower and work with the speeds of the WD Green. WD Black is designed for performance and durability, having higher rpm, larger cache, higher read/write speeds and a built-in dual-core CPU.

Another thing to think about is the firmware and the features of the drives. Some drives are classified as NAS/RAID drives because they are designed and tuned for that purpose, having additional features such as TLER and other additions to their firmware that enable the drives to work together in a single array and significantly lower the chance of dropping out of those arrays. Although WD Green and WD Black would work, they are not designed and classified for that purpose. WD Red on the other hand is such a drive that has different settings, tuning and features, compared to the other two.

 

It is recommended to use similar drives in one array (manufacturer, model, features) in order to avoid compatibility issues and potential risk of data loss. 

If you don't want to spend a lot of money on this I can give you two other options:

- If you are looking for both speed and redundancy, get one more drive from each WD Black and WD Green, use the WD Black drives in RAID0 (they are reported to work fine in it) and use the two WD Green drive in RAID1 as a backup of the RAID0 (they are known to work good in Mirror mode).

- If you are looking only for speed or only for redundancy, use either of the options above and use the rest of the HDDs for backups or additional data that you don't need a backup to.

 

You can use the SSDs for caching of either RAID setup and, again, for less important files that you don't need a backup to plus a bootable drive. 

 

Captain_WD.