HP ProLiant server – multiple raid controllers

hphp-prolianthp-smart-arrayraid

We just got a brand new HP DL370 G6 server with 14 X 146 gb and 2 X 300 gb sas drives.

Inside we got 3 raid controllers (one HP DL370, one HP P410 and one HP P812).

It has 2 disk bays and each of them is full. There are 4 cables that come out of them and go into the controllers. And i've connected them to the P410 and P812 array controllers.

The server will be used as the central server for our ERP.

I want to do the raid arrays like this:

  • 1 X raid 1 from 2 small hdds (operating system)
  • 1 x raid 1 from 2 small hdds (tempdb)
  • 1 x raid 10 from 4 small hdds (database files)
  • 1 x raid 10 from 4 small hdds (database logs – on another controller from the one above)
  • 1 x raid 1 from 2 large hdds (backups, etc).

I want to have 2 hotspares (one for each controller, except the big drives raid).

My question is: can I assign some drives as hot spare from one controller to be a hot spare even for the other controller? Or as a global hot spare for all the controllers?

Best Answer

I'm a HP-geek, you don't want to do it like that at all, here's how;

  1. Throw away the P410, connect all disks to the P812.
  2. Create two arrays, one RAID 10 array from the 14 x 146GB disks and a second RAID 1 from the 2 x 300GB disks. Assign one of the 146GB disks as a hot-spare to the first array.
  3. Create logical disks from each array; LUN 1 at whatever size for boot disks, LUN 2 at whatever size for tempdb - carry on like this, basically let the array manage itself and don't worry about logical disk sizes matching physical disk sizes, it's not important, although obviously the backup disks will come from a single ~300GB second array so there's a limit to how you'll carve this up.

Is that clear? basically all the 146GB disks are in one big R10, backups are from a R1 array and use the P812 to just logically carve up the drives - it's easy and why you pay so much for the P812, let it do your work for you :)

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