I have a server with room for a total of 6 disks. Ultimately, it will be running VMs hosting various services, such as Exchange, and others. My idea is to get the stores and transaction logs on seperate spindles, and possibly even the OS itself on its own spindle. The server is mission-critical, but does not need to have 24/7 uptime. It will be running vmware, though all of our other servers are running Hyper-V as a service. How should I divide up the disks?
Do I do three RAID-1 arrays, for maximum spindle sets?
Do I do a RAID-1 and a RAID-10? RAID-10 has higher performance than just a plain stripe/mirror AFAIK, but if my workload performance is dependent on separate spindles, could this be unoptimal?
Should I opt for two RAID-5 sets? As far as I know, the only benefit to this would be more storage space. Are there other benefits I'm missing?
Or should I just RAID-6 the whole goddamn thing? ;)
Edit: The comment on the OP of this post seems to follow my line of thought--that if IOPS are important, more spindles are preferred. But I'd like to hear some other opinions too.