VSA - How does Virtual RAID work?

[oikjn]

Just to reiterate what bart said. 

The VSA drives are implemented as Raid0 Stripes, so if you want hardware redundancy at the VSA level you need to provide that before the VSA (you can present hardware raid LUNs direct to the VSA or you can present a vhd that is protected by raid below it).

beyond that, the VSA and hardware nodes act and program the same way, but keep in mind that performance is only as good as the underlying hardware.

The other item of concern I see with your comments is that I"m not 100% sure if you are thinking you are going to do snapshots or are thinking you are going to create a multi-site cluster with this setup.  STAY AWAY from multi-site with what you mentioned here.  Keep in mind that with true synchronous replication all your data is going to be as fast as the SLOWEST node, so if you put on one or two slow VSAs on the remote site, it will bring your local performance to its knees!  YOu will have latency/throughput and then Node performance all to worry about.  I would highly suggest sticking to remote snapshot replication for DR or if you require a true multi-site san, you have to pay the price and buy the true matching nodes for the cluster.  Any cheaper and you are going to have problems. 

[oikjn]

and to your last post... I would suggest the hardware raid 5 and 1 for the sas/ssd's so you don't have to worry about a single disk brining down a node....  if you don't, you basically have a raid 01 setup between the raid0 of the hdds and raid1 of the nodes, but if you do a search about raid01 you will see why it really isn't used.