dark alex Posted February 7, 2013 Share #1 Posted February 7, 2013 Hi together, I would like to know what you would do in my situation: I have XPE running on a HP MicroSerer N40L running VMWare ESXi 5.0 The reason why vmware is that I have to run another small machine on it. Now my question is how would you set up the data storage if you were me? I have three Hard Disks dedicated for NAS data storage, 2TB, 2TB, 3TB A fourth HDD of 1 TB is used as vmware datastore for placing the system containers on. I could now use three ways to create a storage: Option 1: Semi-HW-RAID Use the onboard RAID Controller (HP) and create a RAID5 over all three disks and give the resulting logical disc as a raw device over to XPE which will then detect one data-disc connected. Advantages: RAID is done before any OS sees the drive. So vmware only has to deal with one drive. Disatvantages: a) If my board crashes I probably might not find a replace... oh! It's HP You know what I mean... b) If I decide to move to another device anytime I will need to backup and restore all data. Option 2: SW-RAID5 Pass all three discs to XPE and let the DSM create a software raid Adv: I can pull the discs out and put them into a DiskStation any time without forcefully having to backup and restore. Dadv: vmware has to deal with three discs Option 3: Container Create SEMI-HW-RAID but do not pass the RAW "device" to XPE but use it as ESX datastore. Then create a big vHD for XPE. Additional to Advs and Diss of Option 1 there is the positive point that I could also use the storage for vHDs. Another negative point is that I have one more layer between the software and effectively writing the block... What way would you use? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts