[Discuss] New to VMWare DataStores

[Edward Ned Harvey (blu)]

> From: Scott Ehrlich [mailto:scott at ehrlichtronics.com]
> 
> I just had a chance to get more involved with the hardware - it turns
> out we actually have a preconfigured RAID 6 setup with each drive
> showing 2 TB available.
> 
> I am going to break the RAID and see capacity we can recover.  Glad it
> is not in production, yet :-)

You're probably saying something that makes sense if read differently or phrased differently, but I can't make any sense of it.

If you have 4x 4TB drives in a raid6, then the OS will only see one drive with 8TB (so the phrase "each drive showing some number of TB" would not be applicable).  Its performance will be terrible for random IO, but probably ok for serial IO which will certainly almost never happen.  Perhaps you might want to change it to Raid-10, or simply two separate mirrors.

If you break the raid and present individual drives to vmware, you will have no redundancy at all.  Cuz as I said in other email - vmware can't do soft raid.