Wednesday 13 July 2011

SBS 2011 Setup Guide v1.9.5

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Somehow I managed to split things up. The newest edition of the guide is here:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Phillip,

couple of questions:
First, why have you switched away from RAID 1+0 to RAID 5?

Second, when you are building your 2008-R2 host, how do you set up your partitions?

Thanks a lot for the efforts and the sharing of your information.

John

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

John,

We have had a lot of discussion over the benefits and drawbacks of RAID 5. The biggest drawback for RAID 5 is when it is used in larger (read many spindled) arrays. There are potential corruption issues.

Our smaller clients are using 4 or 6 drive based servers. So, to gain access to more storage we look to RAID 5.

Also, when the RAID 5 array is tied to a hardware RAID controller like the RS2BL040 and 15K SAS drives we get great performance. Plus, we can set the RAID controller to watch over the data on all of the platters which mitigates the possiblity of data corruption.

We set up one volume/logical disk on the RAID controller with the following partition scheme:

Part: C: OS @ 130GB + 5GB/Mailbox
Part: S: Swap File @ RAM * 2.5
Part: L: WorkingStorage @ Balance

Thanks,

Philip