Raid options for Fujitsu TX1310 M1

[whippy999]

Hey guys, bought a TX1310 last year to run my home and business needs (plex, exchange, datastore, SQL, host is 2012 r2 datacenter with hyper-v enabled, specs are below

Xeon 1226 v3

32GB Memory (exchange and SQL absorb memory)

60GB SSD for Host OS & Drivers

2*500GB for VM OS Drives

2*3TB WD Reds for all storage for VM's

2*128 GB for SQL Data (invoicing software and inventory)(running on a PCIe RAID card, no hardware RAID.

getting really slow VM's with the built in software RAID and looking for a decent 8 port hardware RAID card, have about £100 to spend, dont mind going for refurb units as I have a second TX1310 (slower drives as a hyper-v replicated server with backups to NAS.

 

was thinking of a PERC 6i but is starting to get old now.

 

Thanks

[leadeater]

What are you using for the software RAID? The Windows disk management?

Realistically SATA class hard disks, especially only 2 are not going to preform all that well for hosting VMs. What I would do if you are able to completely reconfigure your storage is use Storage Spaces with Auto Tier.

Create a disk pool with the 2x 3TB + 2x 128GB SSD (possibly also 2x 500GB but check it doesn't actually decrease usable space) and create a virtual disk with Auto Tier enabled with 2-way mirror as the redundancy option. This will do block level SSD caching and I can say it works extremely well, better than almost any enterprise SSD caching I have used and in a completely different league to LSI SSD cache.

You can also manually pin the SQL VHDX files to the SSD tier if you really want to make sure they go fast.

If you are set on hardware RAID make sure you get a card that has the battery backup module with it so you can use write-back cache else it won't be any faster than the currently software RAID.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn789160.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/10/21/storage-spaces-how-to-configure-storage-tiers-with-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

[whippy999]

Thanks for info, was not too sure about using storage spaces as a new technology, i will give it a go with the spare server, see how performs.