IBM BladeCenter S: Disk Configuration

Posted by gravyface on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by gravyface
Published on 2011-03-18T00:03:09Z Indexed on 2011/03/18 0:11 UTC
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Have just the one storage bay right now (SAS 15K 600GB x 6) and have configured one storage pool in RAID 10 with 4 disks (and two global spares). For each blade, I've created a volume and mapped accordingly:

  • Blade #1 400 GB
  • Blade #2 200 GB
  • Blade #3 100 GB
  • Blade #4 100 GB

When I boot up Blade 1 and enter into the UEFI Setup (F1) followed by the Adapters and UEFI Drivers > LSI Logic Fusion MPT SAS Driver Utility, I see 4 disks: two are the on-board 73GB drives, the other two are 200GB each and assume I'm being presented with two logical disks from the volume I created and mapped to this blade. I was a bit surprised by this: I figured I would've been presented with one logical drive per volume, not two.

I'm assuming I can just configure whatever RAID level I wish that supports two disks, but not really sure what the benefits/trade-offs here. Should I go with RAID 10 on top of RAID 10? RAID 0? Software RAID 0/1/10? Does it even matter?

If this is "normal" to see two disks, then I'm going to likely just do some benchmarking and see if it makes a difference changing the RAID levels (my guess is no); if this is not normal, well, please let me know. :)

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