I am in the process of restructuring the infrastructure on our servers. I am thinking of using either RAID 5 (1 hot spare) vs RAID 10 as my 1U server has 4 HDD tray.
RAID 5 would have better capacity but RAID 10 has better overall performance. Which one do you guys go for a shared hosting server?
I`m building some Xeon Nehalem servers for shared hosting with cPanel. The servers will be:
Dell PowerEdge R410
Xeon Nehalem E5502
12GB DDR3 RAM
3ware raid controller
But for shared hosting, is it worthy to have a RAID-10, or would a RAID-1 be enough?
We have some Xeon E3xxx servers running with RAID-1 hosting more than 1000 accounts, we hadn`t had any IO/load problem so far.
Quote:
Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.
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So I've just got a server with 2xSATA raid 1 (OS, cpanel and everything in here) and 4xSCSI raid 10 (clean).
Which one do you guys think will give the best performance:
1. Move mysql only to 4xSCSI raid 10
2. Move mysql and home folder to 4xSCSI raid 10
Is it possible to turn a non raided setup into Linux software raid, while it is live, and if it's the OS drive? Can you even software raid the OS drive remotely? I've been thinking about doing it for the redundancy (and possible slight performance boost for reads, but doing it more for redundancy). I'm using CentOS.
View 12 Replies View RelatedI've been talking to the Planet about trading in my four and a half year old "SuperCeleron" (from the old ServerMatrix days) Celeron 2.4 GHz system for something new. As part of their current promotions, I've configured a system that looks decent:
Xeon 3040, 1 gig of RAM, 2x250GB hard disks, RHEL 5, cPanel+Fantastico, and 10 ips for $162.
Not too bad. I could bump up the ram to 2 gb for, I think, $12 more, which I'm thinking about and wouldn't mind some thoughts on. But, the thing that has me really confused is RAID. I like the idea of doing a RAID 1 setup with those two hard disks. But, the Planet wants $40/month for a RAID controller to do it. I really don't want to go over $200 a month!
Any thoughts on alternative redundancy strategies that might avoid that cost? Software RAID does not seem to be offered by the Planet, unless I can figure out how to do it after installation (is that possible?) Better ideas in general on the server?
Is Motherboard RAID as good as a dedicated PCI-E card? I am guessing a dedicated card is the best option, though costs more.
We are looking at buying a barebones server from Supermicro. It features an onboard RAID controller which supports RAID 0, 1, 5 & 10 - but for some strange reason it will only support RAID 5 if you use Windows. Here is a link to the page detailing the RAID features.
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We are going to be running Linux, CentOS 5.1, so we will only have the choice of RAID 0, 1 or 10. This isn't an issue, as having RAID 10 on 4x SAS (15k) drives will be fine for speed and stability. What is an issue is would this RAID controller be as fast or reliable compared to a dedicated PCI-E card? If it can only use RAID 5 in windows, does that suggest this controller is too reliant on software? It would be a nightmare to suffer downtime and data loss because the controller couldn't hack it during a drive failure, or one day it decided to bugger up the array when rebooting.
So that leads me to looking at this card, this looks very good for what we need. Are adaptec a reliable brand? I've seen it advertised for £200, which is a good price.
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This card features RAID 5 and 6, would RAID 6 be better than RAID 10 for redundancy, or is it too slow to bother with? Also it seems to have a battery module available for it, what does this achieve? Cos surely if the power dies the hard drives and motherboard can't run off this little battery, or does it just help the controller stay alive long enough with some hard drive information in its memory if the power goes out during a rebuild?
I could try the Software-RAID 5 of the EQ9 Server of Hetzner.
Does anyone here has experiences, how fast a hardware raid 5 compared against the software-Raid 5 is?
The i7-975 should have enough power to compute the redundnacy on the fly, so there would be a minimal impact on performance. But I have no idea.
I want to run the server under ubuntu 8.04 LTS x64.
On it a vitualisation like VMware the IO-Load could get really high.
I am in a somewhat complicated situation... I wanted to order a custom server with hardware 3Ware RAID controller but after over a month of waiting I was told the HW RAID controller, as well as any other 3Ware controller they tried, does not work with the motherboard used in the server from Fujitsu-Siemens and that they simply got a reply from FS that the controller is not certified to work with their motherboard.
So although I'd prefer a HW raid, I am forced to either choose a different webhost or setup a software RAID. The problem is, I haven't done that before and am somewhat moderately...scared
I have read a lot of the info about SW RAID on Linux that I could find through Google but there are some questions unanswered still. So I thought that perhaps some of the more knowledgeable WHT members could help me with this problem...
The server specs will be:
Core2Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 2GB RAM, 6-8x* 250GB SATA II HDDs, CentOS 4.4 or SuSe, DirectAdmin
* I prefer 8 HDDs (or actually 9) over 6 but I am not sure if their server chassis can hold that many HDDs, I am awaiting answer from them. They don't have any other drives beside the 250GB ones so I am limited to those.
The preferred SW RAID setup is to have everything in RAID 10, except for the /boot partition which has to be on RAID-1 or no RAID I believe, plus one drive as hot spare (that would be the 9th drive). I am quite sure they will not do the setup for me but will give me access to KVM over IP and a Linux image preinstalled on the first HDD so that I'll have a functional system that needs to be upgraded to RAID-10.
How do I do that? The big problem I see is that LILO or GRUB can't boot from a software RAID-5/10 so I will have to mount the /boot partition elsewhere. It's probably terribly simple...if you have done it before which I have not. I have read some articles on how to setup a RAID-5/10 with mdadm (e.g. [url] ) but they usually do not talk about how to setup the boot partition. Should it be setup as a small sized (100-200MB) RAID-1 partition spread over all of the drives in the otherwise RAID-10 array?
What about swap? Should I create a 4-8GB (I plan to upgrade the server RAM to 4GB in near future) RAID-1 swap partition on each of the disks or swap to a file on the main RAID-10 partitions. The second sounds simpler but what about performance? Is swapping to a file on RAID-10 array a bad idea, performance wise?
Is it possible to grow a RAID-10 array in a way similar to growing a RAID-5 array with mdadm (using two extra drives instead of one of course)? mdadm doesn't actually even mention RAID-10 despite it does support it without having to create RAID-0 on top of RAID-1 pairs if the support is in kernel, from what I know.
How often do RAID arrays break? Is it worth having RAID if a servers hard drive goes down? I was thinking it may just be a better option to just have a backup drive mounted to my system and in the even of a system failure just pop in a new hard drive, reload the OS, and then reload all my backups?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI have a new server and it is rather slow during raid 1 recovery after system installed
CPU: Intel Core2Duo E5200 Dual Core, 2.5Ghz, 2MB Cache, 800Mhz FSB
Memory: 4GB DDR RAM
Hard Disk 1: 500GB SATA-2 16MB Cache
Hard Disk 2: 500GB SATA-2 16MB Cache
root@server [~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
256896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
2096384 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 sdb4[2] sda4[0]
480608448 blocks [2/1] [U_]
[=======>.............] recovery = 36.7% (176477376/480608448) finish=1437.6min speed=3445K/sec
the sync speed is just 3.4Mb/second and the total hours needs to be more than 40 hours
Also the server load is very high (nobody uses it)
root@server [~]# top
top - 07:00:14 up 16:55, 1 user, load average: 1.88, 1.41, 1.34
Tasks: 120 total, 1 running, 119 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4148632k total, 747768k used, 3400864k free, 17508k buffers
Swap: 5421928k total, 0k used, 5421928k free, 569252k cached
I want to take some data from a raid-disk (taken from a raid-1 sstem). Put it into a new system already, but this system doesn't have any raid.
When viewing "fdisk -l", it said /dev/sdb doesn't contain valid partition. Is there anyway I can mount it now? I am on CentOS 4 box
MY server configure our drives with RAID-1.
How can I check it my server configure with 3ware or software raid ?
Also please advise me how can I monitor raid configuration that my raid is working fine or no ?
Just curious what your thoughts are on performance:
2 SCSI Drives 10k w/RAID 1
or
4 SATA 10k w/RAID 10
Prices are not too different with 4 drives just being a tad more.
how well software raid can perform and how it compares to hardware raid. How does software raid actually work and is it worth it?
How should I look at be setting up software raid if I was going to? Would you recommend just to use hardware raid instead?
Which do you guys recommend of the following?
4x 73GB 15,000rpm SAS drives in a RAID 10
or
4x 73GB 15,000rpm SAS drives in a RAID 5 w/ online backup
support request should be on average 30minute or less, at no time no longer then 1 hour.
raid 1, sata, size does not matter
preferably core2duo
Are there any significant difference between 4 15K SAS HD in RAID 10 versus 8 7.2K SATAII HD in RAID 10? I have the same question for 2 15K SAS HD in RAID 1 versus 4 7.2K SATAII HD in RAID 10.
View 13 Replies View RelatedI'm currently using 4 x 15K SAS raid 10 for a mysql server for a pretty busy forum, it has no I/O problem.
Now i'm going to migrate to a new server that i'm building soon, I have choice of:
2 x Intel X25-E SSD RAID 1
or
4 x 15K Fujitsu SAS RAID 10
will be using Adaptec 2405 RAID card.
The OS will be installed on a seperate hard drive.
If I go with the SAS setup, will be about $200 cheaper.
Which one do you think is better for Mysql performance?
I have room for 4 more hard drives on my home server. My original goal was to go raid 10 but I've been thinking, raid 5 can support 4 drives and give more capacity. Which one would have better performance as software (md) raid? I'm thinking raid 10 might actually have bad performance as software raid, vs hardware, compared to raid 5. Would raid 5 with 4 drives be better for my case?
View 10 Replies View RelatedWe are looking to build our first server, and collocate it. It will be a higher investment than just renting the server, but will be worth it in the long term, and we have already decided we are going to support the hosting business for a minimum of 3 years - so we might as well invest in a server from the outset to benefit from lower data center charges and higher redundancy and performance.
We are currently looking at Supermicro for servers as they offer 1U barebones systems with dual hotswappable psus and upto 4 hotswappable drives. This would be ideal for redundancy, and also for taking advantage of the speed and redundancy that a RAID 10 array would give you. These two factors combined are very appealing as it would reduce the possibilities of downtime and data loss. Obviously we will be backing up daily, but its good for piece of mind to know that you could potentially blow a PSU and 2 hard drives, and your server will still be up long enough for a data centre technician to replace the parts.
Now then, my business partner and I are currently deciding what the best all round hard drive configuration would be. He has decided that we should opt for SAS instead of SATA to have lower latency seek times, which would give us better performance. I agree, though this does increase costs considerably.
He is then arguing that we use RAID 5 on cost grounds. He says we should only use 3 of the slots to begin with, save money on one drive by not having a spare, and hope we don't have a drive failure - which sods law will happen. I'm not happy us cutting corners to save money, because if we gamble and lose, that's a hell of a mess we have ourselves in, and will cost us a load more time, reputation and data center charges to get ourselves out of it.
I say we might as well go for RAID 10 for that extra performance, and redundancy, you can potentially lose 2 drives so long as they aren't from the same mirrored pair. With RAID 5 you can only lose a drive, it takes longer to rebuild onto a spare, and during rebuild the performance takes a hit. Also RAID 10 is much faster than RAID 5, and at the expense of the cost of a drive.
Now the question we should be asking is... would a SATA2 RAID 10 array provide better performance than a SAS RAID 5 array?
So I think the choice we have to make is either go for RAID 5 and run with a hot spare, and stock a cold spare, or go with RAID 10 and stock 2 cold spares.
We are considering going with Seagate drives because they are high performance and have 5 year warranties. I have had to RMA two Western Digital drives already in the past 12 months, a raptor and a mybook, both deaths invoked data loss.
The server is going to be a linux web, email, dns and mysql box. It will likely feature a single dual/quad core processor, and 4-8GB of unbuffered ddr2 ram.
I'm trying to build a physical raid 0/5 that can plug in to any computer which has SCSI behind it.
What are components you recommend (case, cpu, motherboard, SATA ...)
This is first time raid builder so i don't really need an expensive components.
Question though on RAID choices... I'm considering getting 3 x 250GB SATA drives. Would it be better to make two of them a RAID-1 mirrored pair for my OS, home directories, and use the 3rd drive seperately for backups, swap, and perhaps some logs.... OR should I put all three drives into a RAID-5 set and treat it as a single logical drive?
my math says usable space would actually be identical... with 465GB usable in either setup. RAID-1 would be faster for I/O with no parity overhead... but one drive would not be redundant. On the other hand, RAID-5 would be fully redundant but have parity overhead for writes.
I think I just sold myself on RAID-5, didn't I.
I was wondering if anyone knows of any provider that provides RAID VPS Mirrored Hosting.
So if one drive goes down, the site will immediately switch over to the next one in the cluster.
Can any one please suggest which raid level is best for a file hosting site?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI was building a 1u server a month or so ago to colocate. After screwing up the purchase of the raid card (got a pci 64 or something) its been sitting next to me not doing much. I need to go ahead and find a good raid card and get this colocated,
I have literally spent hours on Newegg, Amazon and Ebay and found nothing that really jumps out at me. When people were helping with the build before, Adaptec was recommended, but the card is now deactivated on newegg so I am looking again.
put together a high availability cluster for a PHP + MySQL based app to run on a LAN. We're going to use Linux, and cost is a major consern. The app itself doesn't use / need too much resources, as it will only be accessed by 2 / 3 people at a time, so I'm using the following:
2 identical PC's with:
3Ghz PIV CPU
1GB RAM
2x SATAII 160GB HDD space setup as RAID 1
10/100 Mbps LAN NIC's, on a 100MB 8 port switch
Up to now I have been running MySQL-Max 5.0.15 to run a MySQL master-master replication server, which works fine, but the setup involved a lot of manual work, and downloading of the right binaries.
Furthermore I used Linux Heartbeat todo auto switchover between the two servers & RSYNC to sync the application files between the two. This has been working fine untill one of the server's HDD's failed recently corrupting both HDD's
So, I need a better way of doing this, and want to meet the following requirements:
If 1 HDD fails on either server, the server still needs to be able to run without a problem.
Replacing a HDD & rebuilding the RAID array should be easy to manage, preferabbly over the net.
Setting up a cluster should be easy to manage, both for the MySQL DB server & the files that need to be synced between the two machines Re-installing the server should be easy todo as well.
For No.1 I have been thinking of setting up RAID 5 with 4x HDD's - how reliable / safe / redundant is this?
For No. 4 I have been thinking of using something like sysimager to backup the server once setup, but will / can it recreate the RAID array upon restoration? The MySQL DB & PHP files are being backed up to a removable HDD on a daily basis.
The client is 700Km's away, so we can't just drop-in to fix things as often as we like. Thus redundancy is of utter importance. Currently I'm running Suse 9.3, simply due to the fact that it's easy enough to tell the client over the phone howto do things with YaST. Suse 10.1 will be used for the new setup, but I could also use Fedora Core 5, and have also been thinking of using SME server 7.0.
I'm about to purchase a new Xeon dedicated server, however I'm unsure whether to opt for a RAID 1 configuration on the two 320GB SATA drives. Can this decrease performance in anyway or only increase? I run an extremely resource hungry site utilising audio/video en/decoding, running vBulletin so anything that might negatively affect performance could have a big impact.
Secondly, I'm unsure on whether to opt for CentOS 5 over 4.5. I'll be using cPanel of which I've heard there have been problems with the latest release of CentOS.
And finally, is it worth upgrading to Apache 2 and MySQL 5 (which I know is installed as default on CentOS 5)? The reason I ask is that I've heard of server load problems after upgrading to these latest versions on high traffic sites.
I have a delicated server with "Intel RAID Controller: Intel(R) 82801ER SATA RAID Controller",I cannot find information on this raid.The 80 GB harddisk is about 4 years old,if one harddisk fail,I wonder if I can swap a new one bigger capacity and it will auto rebuilt?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI haven't yet broken into the realms of dedicateds, although I have a decent VPS and am anticipating the need to get a dedi in the future.
Hence I'm wondering briefly why exactly RAID (insert some random number?) is recommended? I know it does something to do preventing hard drive failure, although would an efficient backup system be a decent alternative with regards to cost?
I would like to hear which configuration you think will be better for a hosting server.
I have allready a raid controller in the server.
I am more concerned with security.