Configure VMware vsphere install with multiple raid arrays

Question

I will preface by stating that I am programmer that has acquired some sysadmin extra duties. I have a server that I have installed VMware vSphere 5 on. The server has two raid arrays. 2 600GB disks in a Raid 1 and 5 2TB disks in a raid 5. Therefore I have two datastores added. I plan to install at minimum 3 VM's. One for some domain tasks, one for a fileserver and the other for a testing machine.

Is there a best practice for installing with the multi raid arrays? How should the datastore's be created? The larger raid array was going to be for the file server.

This is a blank server so if I need to reinstall I can. This can also be a VMFS-5 file system.

Answer 1

A larger best practice would be to have storage separated onto a different machine (i.e. centralized storage).

If it's all local, though, you'll be fine either way. I'd recommend moving to RAID 10 for the 5 2TB disks (with one hot spare) for performance (RAID 10 is considerably faster at writes than 5, and faster to recover in case of disk failure).Afterwards, you can put the file server on that array, along with the "domain tasks" VM.

Use the smaller array for dev/test so the production array isn't impacted.

Answer 2

Get rid of the 2 x 600GB disk, swap them for two of the same 2TB disks - performance is obviously not a concern for you - and make a larger RAID 6 array with one whatever-sized logical disk and let VMFS do what it wants with it.