Mike RAID 1 is not *that* slow - unless you are doing massive file transfers continuously. For everyday use in a server, data transfer rates are fine using RAID 1. It's easy to configure, great redundancy and to recover is very straightforward - install the new disk, partition it and then add it to the array and it will rebuild itself. I use RAID1 in quite a few servers and do not see a noticeable performance decrease (even in a machine based around a Celeron 366). As to hardware RAID - I'd only really touch Adaptec stuff and even then only with SCSI disks - it's tried and true. Software RAID works great for Linux boxes. Angus On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 21:09 -0400, Michael A. Coan wrote:
Anders,
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Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64.
Yes, I can attest to that, it runs very nicely
Thanks for the confirmation.
Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files.
RAID 0 is striping and will give you extra speed. But RAID 0 has the huge drawback if one drive fails, the whole thing comes crashing down, and you'll have to reinstall everything.
I realize that. I guess my initial thought was tht it is very easy to reinstall SuSE 9.3 (less than an hour). Since Windows server will be a guest OS, it will only be 6 or 7 files, so I copy over the files in 10 minutes and it is reinstalled. I figured that the time saved by using RAID 0 over say three years, would more than offset the time it takes to reinstall. Maybe that is foolish.
Maybe i should use a 3ware controller and do raid 5. this time I will know what the beeping is :) Or would you recommend RAID 10 instead.
i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive.
The value of reading manuals. If you had known what the beeping meant, you could have kept the machine running (bar perhaps for the time it takes to throw in a new drive, if the hardware doesn't support hotplugging). This is why people have redundancy. Their time costs more than the hardware
My excuse is that someone else bought and installed the server, and since it was a Windows machine I tried not to get involved too muh. My mistake,
If SuSE 9.3 supports raid10 or raid 0+1 in software, then i suppose i could just get 4 drives. I ahve heard that raid1 is fairly slow.
Mike
Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel: 914-632-3778 Fax: 914-632-5502