dl370 g6 boot drive for vmware

[danletkeman]

Hello,

We currently have two dl370 g6 servers, and we are using two of the 16 sas drives in a mirror as a boot drive for vmware. I'm wondering if there is a way that we can install a pair of internal drives as a mirror for a boot drive for vmware and utilize those two sas drives for extra storage? If not, is there a different alternative?

Thanks,
Dan.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi!

I'm not quite sure I understand what you want to do.

You want to use a pair of internal drives as a mirror for a boot drive. You are using two drives in a mirror already as a boot drive.

Do you want to add two more disks to the boot drive?

You can create a logical volume for the boot drive, and then another logical volume for data storage. So that you do not have to use the whole disks for the OS.

[danletkeman]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.

I have 16 drives, and I have currently taken two of them and made a mirror for the boot drive. I was wondering if its possible to add two more drives to some kind of internal controller and use that for booting so that I can use all 16 of the sas drives for data storage.

So what you are saying is that I can create a logical drive out of the current raid? So for example, all of the disks would be part of a raid 5 or 6, and then there would be a logical drive that consists of lets say 10gb, and the rest I could use for data storage in a separate logical drive?

I guess we set it up in a hurry, because I didn't even see that you can do that. The only option I saw was to create a separate raid out of two drives for booting.

Thanks,
Dan.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi, from the quickspecs it looks like there is only the p410i (i = internal, this is the same in all the different models). So I do not think there is an extra controller.

And yes, you can make one big R5 (and then slice it up with logical volumes of different sizes).

However, one big raid5 with 16 drives is not a good idea. Maybe better to do two R5 or maybe a raid6 or look into using raid1 if it's important stuff you have on the disks.

Statistically when it comes to drive failures, 16 drives in a parity-raid is a bad idea. There is some math/statistics involved in this, and I'm sure there are web sites around that can tell you why not to use raid5.

[danletkeman]

So these logical drives are created in the raid controller?

And you can specify any size? And boot from any logical drive?

Thanks,
Dan.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey!

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual〈=en&cc=us&docIndexId=64179&taskId=101&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3883890

and see this document "Configuring Arrays on HP Smart Array Controllers Reference Guide".

The RAID configuration is stored both on the disks and on the controller (so you can replace a controller).

In ACU you:
*create an array.
*inside the array you create logical volumes.

You set size and the RAID level on these logical volumes.