VA7400

[Simon White_1]

I currently have a requirement to have two HP LXr8500 running Windows 2000 Advanced server in a cluster environment running a database application. Both servers are fibre connected through two Brocade switches to a dual controlled VA7400. The VA7400 is fully populated with 15 x 36GB disks and will be dedicated to this application. The database will need to grow to approximately 100GB. I am looking for advice on LUN sizing and configuration and whether to use RAID 1/0 or AutoRaid. If I create a single LUN do I present this to the W2K server as a Basic disk or Dynamic disk ? I will also want to make use of Business Copy for reporting and backups. Can anyone help ? Thanks Simon

[Marco Hogeveen]

Simon,

One question can be answered easily:
Dynamic disks are not supported on a cluster.
See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q237853 for details.
I'll let you know when I found more answers/recommendations.

Marco.

[Enes Dizdarevic]

Due to virtualisation and optimisation techiques implemented in VA AUTORAID mode has very good performanse and there is no need to use raid 0/1 mode. For the same reason number of luns does not affect performanse. You can have all data and log files on one lun with the same performance as if you had one lun for logs, another for data files. I would recommend small number of big luns to simplify configuration. (I have one VA connected to 2 Win2k clusters and one standalone win2k server, all with MS SQL working very well in AUTORAID mode with one lun for each SQL virtual server instance).
If you want to use business copy use third server to mount business copy luns on it to avoid problems with mounting two disks with the same signature on one server. In this case you have to use secure manager to controll server access to luns.