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Configuration Lefthand!

 
Marcel de Jager
Contributor

Configuration Lefthand!

Hi There,

We bought a lefthand P4000 4.8 GB starterpack for our network. Attached to the lefthand the will be 3 VMware hosts. On this hosts there will be running windows 2008 servers and they al are running file, print and webservices so there is noting heavy to it. However we also go to run Exchange 2007 for about 300 users. I read that is it better to put the exchange data on a different disk.

At his point I made 1 volume on the lefthand where all servers (Still testing) from wmware are stored. Al disk in the lefthand are in a raid 5 configuration and both nodes are mirrored to each other.

Question 1: is it better to store the exchange data on a separate disk (in mirror) on the lefthand?

Question 2: Can I change the configuration from the lefthand to get a free disk? Or do I have to do the whole setup again?

Question 3: has anybody some idea's that are better?

Thanks,

Marcel
1 REPLY 1
Julian Ricketts
New Member

Re: Configuration Lefthand!

Hi Marcel

We recommend as a best practice 4 Virtual machines per volume.

Firstly the nodes are shipped in a raid 5 configuration and a hot spare is not supported. Looking at the number of users I would suggest leaving this as is.

1) You cannot define where the data sits on a disk as with the FC storage. We create a volume and then provision it to a Vmware server.

I suggest creating the necessary volumes for Exchnage and then allocating them as seperate volumes to VMware as a Raw device mapping or VMDK.


2) We do onot support hot spare disks as the box is made up of two raid 5 sets and then SANIQ parity stripes to raid 50. There is also need for a hot spare, if there are two boxes in the cluster and 2 way replication running.

3) I would suggest buying another node to add extra resilience and also IOPS and response times