0

Today I have a QNAP TS-859U+ with 8 X 2TB disks in it.

As it's was setup on day-1 it uses a single volume on a raid 5.

The volume has currently a mixture of:

  • 2 shared folders
  • 5 iScsi Targets - of which
    • 1 is a 1TB datastore to a VMware ESXi5
    • 3 are LUNs in a W2K8R2 and are the used for the company as the network folders (Management, QA, RD...)
    • 1 is LUN for an SQL database server - holding all DB files

The total used storage I have is <5TB so I don't mind rebuilding a single Raid10 on the NAS (even consider the Raid10 + hot spare)

My question:

  • Should I divide the volumes into 2 seperate ones?
  • How big should they be?
    • on one volume assign to my VM Datastorate
    • on 2nd volume give to my network?
      • for my network, should I use a single large iScsi ? or keep the same small splits

I will appreciate any RTFM links, as I couldn't find the right answers (maybe I am asking the wrong question)

  • I can not say that we have high number of reads or writes - but I don't know if I can measure that (count new files?)
  • I am able to use a backup NAS for the transition (of which I will need a plan of how to make that transition work)

1 Answer 1

3

Firstly please don't use RAID 5, especially with large consumer SATA disks, you're literally guaranteeing data corruption any time you have to replace a disk.

Use RAID 6 if you need the space but if you can afford to then you definitely want RAID 10, for both performance and reliability.

As to how you carve it up, if you felt comfortable using NFS to access you VM .vmdk's you may be able to get away with one large volume, that way you'd not be 'giving away' all that 1TB on day-one for the iSCSI LUN. Just a thought, you may not like doing that but there are plenty of people on here with a lot of expertise in NFS based VMWare so you can always come back with more specific questions around that, performance-wise it should be broadly similar to iSCSI too.

1
  • Thanks, I will consider R6+H or R10 (for reliability - I think R6+HS is better) - I do ask as how to "carve it" as I am not comfortable with VM's directly accessing the NFS.
    – Saariko
    Aug 8, 2012 at 9:55

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .