eight 300GB SAS drives are available. Can ESX be put on one disk as RAID-0 and others as RAID-5 ? so that in the event of disk failure data (VMs) are safe.
if os disk RAID-0 fails could that be installed on replacement disk and still be able to keep VMs running?
if not RAID-1 for OS is only option for OS disk? please suggest any other RAID options.
All: many thanks for your responses. the question that remains is which RAID? my situation:
- at max handle 1 disk failure
- be more storage efficient (less disk cost)
- better I/O write perf
- if esxi 4 can handle locking better (Chopper) then why not RAID-6 or 5 for all 8 disks instead of separating OS and data volumes? does this provide ability replace failed disk and continue since OS is now mixed up with data?
- How good is RAID-50? is it better than RAID-5?
Best Answer
What's wrong with just R10'ing all 8 drives into a single logical disk (LD) of ~1.2TB, it'll be faster and a lot more resilient than your R0+R5 suggestion and gives you the same available space as Tom's R1+R6 suggestion (sorry Tom, you know I love you right). There's no need to have the OS on a different disk than the VMs at all, especially if you're using v4 as it handles locking much better.
EDIT FOLLOWING QUESTION EDIT
Basically you can't have it all, let's look at your newly-added criteria;