[INFO] - StoreVirtual 4530 upgrade

[x007alfa]

Hi forum! First message on here I hope everyone is doing well

I'm currently investigating upgrading my company's virtualization cluster and we have a semi-old StoreVirtual 4530 equipped with 12 600gb 15k hdd, the standard 64gb of memory and the standard 2620 xeon 6 core...

I'm planning on dropping a few ssd in it to replace the hdds because while being old it still has 10g iscsi capability and after upgrading a bit I think it can still be plenty fast for what we need to do...

I was wondering since the ssds will jack up the throughput a lot compared to hdds (now I have a raid6 configuration and I was planning on a raid 50 or 60 not sure yet any suggestions would be appreciated...) I was wondering if upgrading the cpu in the thing would be a good road to take since that generation of xeons even v2 ones based on ivy-bridge are pretty cheap...

What are your suggestions? aside from changing the whole box which I would really like to avoid for now...

I basically need suggestions just on what is good to upgrade and when going to ssds what raid config is a better alternative

Thanks a lot!

Fabio

[x007alfa]

up...

Please I need to know just if the thing supports two volumes one made of ssds and one of hdds...

Or does it need to be only one type of drive?

I really don't want to spend 4000€ if I can avoid it...

[Assen]

Hi Fabio,

First of all, welcome to the forum.
I have to start with saying that the Storevirtual is a Storage Solution and that any customizations that you intend to do, are not supported.
This solution works as designed and there is absolutely no guarantee that it would work as expected if you start customizing the solution.

The 4530 comes in two flavours. One is with SAS disk and the other with MDL disk. The first solution has two logical drives. Logical drive 0 is the OS and it's a Raid6 (spanning disk 1-12). The logical drive 1 is a Raid5 (spanning disk 1-12) but can be also changed to Raid6 from the CMC.
The MDL solution has 3 logical drives, logical drive 0 OS Raid6 (spanning drive 1-6), logical drive 1 Raid5/Raid6, raid depending on the hdd capacity (2 or 3TB disks) and logical drive 2 1 Raid5/Raid6. But you can check all this in the ILO Storage Info or the Array Configuration Utility.

I would personally say that it's quite risky to test it out and find out that it's not what you expected it to be or that's not working at all.

BR
Assen

[x007alfa]

Hi Assen,

thanks for your replay sorry for being a bit late

So you are saying the way I bought it I have to keep it that way? Seems kind of a bad approach don't you think? 
Not saying is anybody's fault I have no idea who comes up with these rules but I assume nobody thought that 600gb 15k drives were gonna be top notch parts for 50 years

HPE in this way is bounding me into buying a new storevirtual if I want to upgrade or an entirely new storage solution and scrap this one which if you ask me makes no sense at all as a customer. For HPE yeah sure it makes sense... money is a good thing!

Oh well... I came up with an alternative anyway... I have 3 DL380G8s in my cluster and gonna make them into a vSan hybrid cluster with 10k drives for capacity and ssd caching. gonna keep the storevirtual as a mass storage for less important things or old vms...