Infrastructure & RAID question

[ArmorBee]

Hello,

I am preparing my environment for Hyper-V.  We are a relatively small shop.  We picked up a P2000 dual controller with 12 1TB disks.

I am virtualizing twelve servers on 3 physical hosts.  Each server has dual quad core procs, 32GB of RAM and a total of 8 NICS to be spread between management, VSwitch and MPIO for iSCSI.

My first question is this.  Would it be better for me to create 2 RAID-5 Vdisks and provision the servers between those two? 

How does this work with HA in Hyper-V?  Can I move the VM's to another host that is connected to a different Vdisk? 

Can I grow the Vdisk if I add another shelf or to I just setup additional storage within the VM?

Also for example I have a single Exchange Server, can I grow the volume by adding disk from another shelf or do I have to bring in another volume.

I am coming from a smaller VMWare ESX 3.5 setup which had local disk.  I am having a hard time wrapping my head around storage best practices for this configuration.  Between Multipathing, RAID considerations and dynamically growing the system.

I greatly appreciate any guidance you can provide.

Thank you,

[Sebastian.Koehler]

From a storage perspective, two Vdisks would be better since you can balance them over the P2000 controllers. Assign one Vdisk to A, the second to B. The created Volumes should be shared by all Hyper-V hosts to enable failover. Right now, Hyper-V does not support anything like sVmotion, but you could move a VM between volumes located on different Vdisks manually.

Expanding a Vdisk in a MSA2000/P2000 takes a lot of time (talking about days, not hours), but it possible. I usually create a new Vdisk and volumes as required.

Regards,
Sebastian