I'm looking for the most cost effective approach to minimizing downtime and data loss for a web server. I was planning on implementing Hardware raid but from my research good RAID controllers are expensive and cheap ones should be avoided. For the cost, I'm not sure it's worth it. We want to keep downtime and data loss to a minimum but a few hours of either isn't huge. We're running regular backups but I want the protection of RAID as well.
Setup: -Windows Server 2008 32-bit -VMWare ESXi -SQL Server 2008 -1 - 1 TB drive. -Space for 3 additional drives
I've just started reading about the Software RAID capabilities of Windows Server 2008. Would that be the best solution? Is it compatible with VMWare? Are there better software raid solutions? Are there other non-RAID mirroring options?