Using mixed disks and OpenFiler to create RAID storage
- by Cylindric
I need to improve my home storage to add some resilience.
I currently have four disks, as follows:
D0: 500Gb (System, Boot)
D1: 1Tb
D2: 500Gb
D3: 250Gb
There's a mix of partitions on there, so it's not JBOD, but data is pretty spread out and not redundant.
As this is my primary PC and I don't want to give up the entire OS to storage, my plan is to use OpenFiler in a VM to create a virtual SAN.
I will also use Windows Software RAID to mirror the OS.
Partitions will be created as follows:
D0 P1: 100Mb: System-Reserved Boot
D0 P2: 50Gb: Virtual Machine VMDKs for OS
D0 P3: 350Gb: Data
D1 P1: 100Mb: System-Reserved Boot
D1 P2: 50Gb: Virtual Machine VMDKs for OS
D1 P3: 800Gb: Data
D2 P1: 450Gb: Data
D3 P1: 200Gb: Data
This will result in:
Mirrored boot partition
Mirrored Operating system
Mirrored Virtual machine O/S disks
Four partitions for data
In the four data partitions I will create several large VMDK files, which I will "mount" into OpenFiler as block-storage devices, combined into three RAID arrays (due to the differing disk sizes)
In effect, I'll end up with the following usable partitions
SYSTEM 100Mb the small boot partition created by the Windows 7 installer (RAID-1)
HOST 50Gb the Windows 7 partition (RAID-1)
GUESTS 50Gb Virtual machine Guest VMDK's (RAID-1)
VG1 900Gb Volume group consisting of a RAID-5 and two RAID-1
VG2 300Gb Volume group consisting of a single disk
On VG1 I can dynamically assign storage for my media, photographs, documents, whatever, and it will be safe.
On VG2 I can dynamically assign storage for my data that is not critical, and easily recoverable, as it is not safe.
Are there any particular 'gotchas' when implementing a virtual OpenFiler like this?
Is the recovery process for a failing disk going to be very problematic?
Thanks.
