RAID 5 with hot spare or RAID 6 for Production System running two virtual Servers

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We are buying a dual hex core ibm x3650 with 64 GB RAM and 7×300 GB HDD. This server is hosting two virtual servers, web server and database server. I am using Double take high availability to replicate the database into a different physical machine. Veeam is used to backup the virtual servers every night.

I was wondering which RAID configuration is best for the environment.

RAID should meet the following requirements:

  1. At the time of failure or rebuilding the array, less chance of data corruption.
    • Otherwise corrupted data will be replicated to another system
  2. As these are production system, performance needs to be high and downtime should be minimal

Any Suggestions?

Best Answer

Neither. If virtual machine performance is paramount, you may want to consider RAID 1+0 with a hot-spare instead of one of the parity RAID variants.

VM activity tends to be mixed random read/write activity. RAID 6 is poor at the random write game. RAID 5 should probably only be considered if you're space-constrained.

RAID 10
Good when: You want speed and redundancy
Bad when: You can't afford to lose half your disk space

RAID 5
Good when: You want a balance of redundancy and disk space or have a large sequential write workload.
Bad when: You have a high random write workload or large drives.

RAID 6
Good when: You want a balance of redundancy and disk space or have a large sequential write workload.
Bad when: You have a high random write workload.

Some of the design considerations and explanations are covered in this post: What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them?

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