S***. Either I deleted the "options" section or it only came out in my head. I have, presently, 2x2TB drives and I'm debating picking up another pair... Without having the NAS and SAN to run with for the data storage, how should I set up the 4 drives? I'm still a novice with handling Hypervisor. Should I retain the existing 250GB drive (and it's datastore) and just upgrade it to a mirror on the 2nd 250GB and then mirror the two 2TBs? Or do one more drive and do a RAID 5 with 4TB? or 2 more drives and a RAID5 with 6TB? I do not need speed. Not at all. This is not a high paced environment by any means, we're a small office but I need to be able to replace my expensive standalone servers with ones that are more efficient one one of them happens to be a fileserver. I'm sorry, I thought I got that out there before. -- Ryan On May 1, 2012, at 12:12 AM, Thomas Lunde wrote: > Ryan - > > Andrew isn't a mind reader and neither am I. I read your post and what he wrote is a completely reasonable response to WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WROTE. What you intended to write, or thought you wrote, may of course be different that what you actually wrote. > > If you'd like help, may I politely suggest that (a) you take another swing at describing your end goal and (b) don't be a dick to someone who is trying to help you. > > Kind regards, > Thomas > > > On Apr 30, 2012, at 11:16 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryanjcole at me.com> wrote: > >> That's the current system. I am getting rid of that; I have a datastore on that drive as well as the 500GB RAID. >> >> But thanks for reading my OP. >> >> Please read it back over and answer... Sorry to be a dick but I hate it when people don't actually read what I wrote. Since you didn't quote any of it I'm including it here for your reading pleasure: >> >>> I have a Dell server rebranded by CSC's FTL group that is currently running 4x250G drives. >>> >>> I want to replace each of those 250G drives with 2TB drives which should last us a while until the big corporation in the sky sees fit to either purchase us a NAS or SAN (which we are operating under the presumption will never happen). >>> >>> So I have 4 bays. the first 250GB presently is the install drive for the VM software. The other three are running a RAID5 to give me a stable 500GB of storage... >>> >>> I'm looking for options here on what to do for my splitting or should I use the whole thing? >>> >>> TIA, >>> Ryan >> >> >> On Apr 30, 2012, at 10:40 PM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: >> >>> Do you really need 250 GB for the VM Hypervisor? VMWare ESX will boot >>> off a USB flash drive. If you're using Linux KVM you would ideally >>> want to have a minimalistic install anyway. A good Linux console only >>> live distro doesn't even fill a single 700 MB CD. Unless you're doing >>> something else on your VM host I would give it a small system >>> partition. Limited space keeps temptation at bay. >>> >>> Personally I like things as simple as possible and would most likely >>> just do one big volume. If you wanted to future proof the installation >>> you could setup LVM so you can easily add disks/storage to your server >>> down the road (via external array, JBOD enclosure, NAS, SAN, >>> whatever), but my experience has been that we end up justifying the >>> new servers and storage and end up doing new installs on the new >>> hardware anyway, so the benefits of LVM don't end up justifying the >>> extra complexity. YMMV of course. >>> >>> -- >>> Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us >>> IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list