Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
Then do a simple OBR6. OBR10 is great, but you're halving your available storage. In a lab do you really need blazing fast storage? Or just more storage to test different things on. . .
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How many drives do you have at the moment?
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hypervisors have stupidly low IOPS requirements.
It would be look cooking a hotdog by standing behind a fight jet as it preps to take off.
hahaha .. ok then it's settled. I'll just throw in the SAS drives. I guess I'm being silly about this...
Yup, a bit silly. Some things to think about below. Just because this is a lab, doesn't mean that you shouldn't think of it like production because the purpose is to be learning and doing weird or anti-production things in the lab is fine, as long as you have a reason for doing it and are thinking things through. Since splitting your array only hurts your lab and you'd never do that in production - it makes no sense.
So here are some of the things to reflect on when you were considing violating normal advice (that you knew about) to do something odd ....
- You are trying to tweak something that has no reason to be tweaked. You are violating the KISS principle and in IT, simplicity is a far bigger deal than in most fields.
- You didn't look at the actual system to see how it would behave, so I'm guessing you ran off of emotions instead of logic and analytics, because what you proposed produces the opposite value to what you stated that you wanted.
- You took a known, very applicable rule of thumb and did the opposite, but without stating a reason for it.
All three of these things are flags you should look for in your decision making processes. This is where your lab can help you to grow the most. Reflect on why you wanted to do this and think about why you thought it sounded good, did you really think about how the system worked, did you really believe you were an exception from the standard rules? If so, why? Did you have bad info, did you run on emotion, etc.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
So you have spare bays? That's a bit different. If you have extra bays, and spare drives, and nowhere else to use them... then whatever. How many spare bays do you have after you use up your 15K drives? A RAID 1 might not make sense. A larger RAID 5 might make sense (with the SSDs) and put some VHDs there.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.
Wow... I'm late to the party.
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@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
Then do a simple OBR6. OBR10 is great, but you're halving your available storage. In a lab do you really need blazing fast storage? Or just more storage to test different things on. . .
Dustin is correct. For a lab, RAID 10 doesn't matter (99.99% of the time) but capacity does. RAID 6 will give you more capacity (and give you the option of an odd number of drives.) Speed isn't important in labs, but capacity is.
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@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.
Wow... I'm late to the party.
Just a tad.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Couple terminology pieces...
Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.
They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
So you have spare bays? That's a bit different. If you have extra bays, and spare drives, and nowhere else to use them... then whatever. How many spare bays do you have after you use up your 15K drives? A RAID 1 might not make sense. A larger RAID 5 might make sense (with the SSDs) and put some VHDs there.
I put all this in my original post
I have 8 bays in my R510. Right now, I just want to install Hyper-V, on a single drive, or two drives in RAID1. Then later, when I have a chance, I'm going to acquire 6 high capacity drives to put in a RAID10 which I can use for storage to hold virtual machines.
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So wait, are slots 0 and 1 the 2.5" bays?
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Couple terminology pieces...
Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.
They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.
Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
So wait, are slots 0 and 1 the 2.5" bays?
This R510 has 8x 3.5" drive bays. My SAS drives are 2.5" but I have the Dell caddie spacer things..
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
So you have spare bays? That's a bit different. If you have extra bays, and spare drives, and nowhere else to use them... then whatever. How many spare bays do you have after you use up your 15K drives? A RAID 1 might not make sense. A larger RAID 5 might make sense (with the SSDs) and put some VHDs there.
I put all this in my original post
I have 8 bays in my R510. Right now, I just want to install Hyper-V, on a single drive, or two drives in RAID1. Then later, when I have a chance, I'm going to acquire 6 high capacity drives to put in a RAID10 which I can use for storage to hold virtual machines.
But this process should never happen in any production setup. It is the opposite of what everyone should be doing. As you are sacrificing a large storage capacity, and a ton of IOPS for something that needs almost no IOPS performance to operate.
OBR6/10 or OBR5 (if all ssds) are the approaches you'll be forced into doing in a production environment. Splitting arrays only removes reliability of the underlying array(s) rather than a single OBR.
Because in an OBR any number of the disks in the array can go tits up. In a split array scenario as described you can lose 1 drive and at that point your screwed. You have to replace the disk and hope everything works.
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@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.
That's kinda what I thought, but I wasn't 100% sure..
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Couple terminology pieces...
Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.
They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.
Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.
Right, Hyper-V is not an OS. Avoid that term.
Also there is more confusion about the product. Let's break this down.
Hyper-V is the Type 1 hypervisor, that means it is always bare metal. Never use the term "bare metal" with Hyper-V, because that is implied. It's redundant, but implies that you are confused and think that there is another option.
Hyper-V is Hyper-V, not Windows. There is no such thing as Windows Hyper-V. There is Windows the OS, and Hyper-V the HV. The two are distinct, separate entities that never merge together. So you have to figure out if you mean you are installing Windows or installing Hyper-V.
Hyper-V has a native installer ISO or it can be installed through a "helper" inside Windows. Those are purely deployment methods and not related to anything else here.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
So wait, are slots 0 and 1 the 2.5" bays?
This R510 has 8x 3.5" drive bays. My SAS drives are 2.5" but I have the Dell caddie spacer things..
But you can't scrounge up eight drives, only six, that match?
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The goal of using RAID is to provide the best reliability against when a disks dies.
If you can increase the chances of not being in a critical failure scenario, you'd take that approach unless you had some very clear technical reason to do something different.
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Also never never never install the Hyper-V role from a bare metal installation of Windows Server. You are binding the licensing to the hardware of that server in this case.
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Couple terminology pieces...
Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.
They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.
Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.
Right, Hyper-V is not an OS. Avoid that term.
Also there is more confusion about the product. Let's break this down.
Hyper-V is the Type 1 hypervisor, that means it is always bare metal. Never use the term "bare metal" with Hyper-V, because that is implied. It's redundant, but implies that you are confused and think that there is another option.
I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't talking about the Hyper-V role in Windows.
Hyper-V is Hyper-V, not Windows. There is no such thing as Windows Hyper-V. There is Windows the OS, and Hyper-V the HV. The two are distinct, separate entities that never merge together. So you have to figure out if you mean you are installing Windows or installing Hyper-V.
I meant "Microsoft" instead of "Windows"
Hyper-V has a native installer ISO or it can be installed through a "helper" inside Windows. Those are purely deployment methods and not related to anything else here.
?
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
Hyper-V has a native installer ISO or it can be installed through a "helper" inside Windows. Those are purely deployment methods and not related to anything else here.
?
Scott is referring to installing the Hyper-V role. It's the "manage my server" or "add roles" feature that scott is referring to as "helper".
