Best Setup

[pow]

I'm setting up a server for testing purposes. Even though its just for testing I do like to get best performance possible.

I'm wondering about disk setup. I have four disk in two arrays. Atm one is configured as RAID 1 (640 GB) and the other is in RAID 0 (2 TB)

Now I'm thinking of installing server 2008 on the 640 RAID 1 and use the 2 TB for media. If I want to test VM's I would install them on the RAID 1 and again use the 2 TB for storage.

 

I could however disable the RAID 1 and use one of the disks for server 2008, the other for vm's and again the RAID 0 for storage.

I'm kinda lost on what the best setup would be.

 

I have to make a config with these disk and have to run about 2 vm's (both win 7). No SAN will be available for this test setup.

 

Any suggestions are more then welcome!

 

regards

[mmthomas]

Is your test hardware old? My personal preference is to use redundant RAID when it is available even if another option would offer faster performance. Even if it's for testing purposes, you can lose a lot of time and work if a disk fails. You don't say what your total number of disks is, but I would do the whole thing as a raid 5 if I were running vmware as the host. If you have plenty of disks, either two RAID 5s or a mirrored set and then a raid 5. Your configuration may depend on what your live environment is like and what exactly you want to test in your test environment. If your hardware is relatively new (i.e. not old and slow), then I don't see a benefit of squeezing out the extra storage performance unless you are testing to use that sort of setup in your live environment -- which I wouldn't recommend anyway as redundancy is usually better.