davidcarrico :
I'm building a new workstation, and plan to use ESXi for virtualization. Would it be wise to configure my storage as RAID5 for performance? Or will it hurt me to have my OS VMDKs on a RAID 5?
Thanks
Dave
I run my ESXi OS and storage volume on the same RAID 5 logical drive. It is nice and fast and I regularly run 2 freebsd VMs with MYSQL database severs side by side.
I have an LSI 8308 controller, it is on the whitebox HCL
Locate the adapter cables BEFORE you buy ANY controller (especially for something that has been End Of Lifed). I learned this lesson the hard way.
I use 3 drives currently and will go with 2 more drives if the current disk speed is not enough. You lose some raw performance with RAID 5 parity, but if you compare three drives in raid 5 to a single drive of the same model, you will find the RAID drives are noticeably faster. (I needed fault tolerance more than performance so I have not benchmarked anything, just observed the performance increase.)
Since drives are very big now, you may want to check up on how large a disk volume you can make that the ESXi OS will recognize. I'm too lazy to read up on it at the moment so I am sticking with 500gb drives and will top out with 5 of them so I don't exceed the 2TB limit of most Windows OSes. Not real scientific as ESXi is Linux based, but safe
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