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Looking for recommendation and thoughts on a server build. Going to have 2 hosts with equal HD space for redundancy running Hyper-V for virtualization. Need 4tb of usable disk space in a raid config, how would you all (as professionals) present that?

SATA? SSD?

If you went SSD what raid config would you use on it? I’m thinking Raid10 is overkill for SSD, thoughts?

TIA

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How many IOPS and how much usable disk space do you need?

The answers to those determines both your connection and disk type as well as your RAID layout.

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RAID 5/6 are typically acceptable as long as you aren’t using consumer SSDs. That being said, the only way to know for sure, as Gary said, is to get more info about your requirements.

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I still hate RAID5 even with SSD’s.

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There’s always 6.

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Yup, RAID 6 is fine. Just not RAID 5. Ever.

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It’s not a high I/O environment at all, small office with not many files being accessed at any time.

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Then I’d go for SATA in RAID 6.

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Agreed.

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The only other thing I could add to this is depending upon their budget, you could consider a NAS as your CSV that would take the redundancy off the servers and speed up IOPs some.

I wouldn’t do SSD for the cluster because of the life cycle for the purpose, lots of writes shorten SSD life. I would do 7500rpm or 10k big spinning disk. It’s cheaper, you get way more storage and if I understand the deployment correctly they won’t see any difference operationally.

Just my $.02 otherwise I agree with everything that has already been said here.

This is not small office config but my standard deployment in my datacenter right now is a 4 server cluster all SAN boot, with SAN based 20TB CSV.

Four way redundancy in the cluster for servers and eight way redundancy for storage. And on the SAN (Netapp) all my RAID Groups are 60 and it’s all on 10GB FCOE at the back end. Been running this config for about 6 years now and it’s flawless.

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While I’m a rabid fan of SSD the fact is that it’s usually a waste of time in small office environments running 1Gb for file services because most SATA spinners can easily keep up.

SSD helps a bit with Server Based Quickbooks and such,but only to an extent. Prices on data center SSD has come down a lot, but you’re still looking at around $2,000 for 4TB of server class RAID SSD in each box…maybe a bit less if you go with RAID 6. Personally, unless there’s some app involved that benefits from SSD I would stick with a couple big SATA spinners, RAID 1 or 10 and put the money into a better RAID card or hot swap.

I also might go with a hybrid and run 1TB of SSD RAID 1 along with a couple fat SATA spinners in RAID 1…but only if something really needs the SSD. Small biz file services typically aren’t a good enough reason.

Like Gary I still won’t run SSD on RAID 5.

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StarWind has ready-nodes based on Windows as well. Allows achieving fault-tolerant Highly Available cluster with single umbrella support. Contact our engineers or PM me to get a live demo.

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