Which RAID for VMware ?

[unreal104]

Hi,

I'm thinking of going for RAID for my MCITP studies, I'm having doubt for choosing what kind of RAID.
RAID0 ,1 or 5 ?... IMO, I dont want to get RAID 0 as there is a high possibility of failure.
And what i want to know is.. for virtual machines.. which is more important.. read or write...
if read is impt... i could get a RAID 1, quite slow for writing but double read rate..
fyi.. i dont have enough budget to get SSD

pls advice..

Thank you so much in advanced!!

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Raid 1 will not give double read speeds. (1 drive will be hidden at all times and is a real time duplicate of the first drive)
performance will be a little slower than 1 single drive but provide redundancy.

I have just setup a Hyper-V envioroemnt here at work on an iSCSI attached SAN.

i picked RAID 6 (same as raid 5 but with 2 parity drives instead of 1)

its provided quite nice performance while still giving me the redundancy we need.

how many drives are you looking at using?

we currently have 8 drives (450gb SAS 15kRPM) with expandability to 12

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Questions.

1. How many drives are you going to have?
2. What will the array be used for (VM OS's only or SCRATCH Drive for CAD work)

 

[unreal104]

3 harddrives..