WE have a Dell R815 with 6x900GB SAS disks and a perc h700 controller.
We want to use it as a dedicated bare metal vsphere server (stand alone).
We have no idea what the best way to partition the beast.
Currently its one big RAID 5 array, with 3 virtual disks:
0=1.8TB
1=1.8TB
2=500GB
We could just run with this, and install vsphere 5 on disk 2, and I guess we can use both the other partitions for VMS (i.e. create 2 storage pools). However, 500GB is probably a waste for just installing vsphere. Also, we guess that to get best performance, we would want different VMS running on differnetn disks via differnt channels in the controller?
Does anyone have any suggestsions for the best disk/raid layout is?
Best Answer
Firstly just don't use RAID5 please - look around on this site, it's one of the most commonly discussed areas and simply put pro sysadmins don't use R5 unless it's data they couldn't care less about - it's horrid, use R6 or R1/10 - there's no excuse for not doing so.
Then onto your question, create one R6/10 array then carve it into one small boot disk (say 10GB), then into <=2TB disks, leaving any extra at whatever it works out to be.
vSphere v5 can deal with >2TB virtual disks but there's a lot of caveats around that and if you don't need to deal with >2TB virtual disks then I'd avoid the complexity. Don't worry about trying to optimise with such a small system, oh and if you've got StorageDRS just set all disks but the boot one (best to delete any datastore the installer may create on that) into one group and let it manage itself.