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I'm totally new to the subject of high-availability / distributed storage, and have to figure out a solution for a particular project.

I am looking at using Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces to create a VHDX made out disks in a JBOD storage expander.

This JBOD rig does nothing in itself and needs to interface into an existing server. The hardware I am looking at for this is:

2U Supermicro 2.5" 24 Bay Storage Expander SAS SSD SATA SC216E16 PT-JBOD-CB2 HBA

I want to attach this to one of my Remote Desktop Services server, which are all HP Proliant DL380 G6 / G7 / G8 servers.

However, this isn't very documented on the internet. Specifically, I'm just trying to figure out:

  • Can these two servers interface?
  • What cable do I need?
  • Do I need to put some card into one of my HP servers? What card?
  • If I were to do 24 2.5" SSD disks, would I need multiple cards?

Sorry if these questions sound dumb, but I'm really feeling around in the dark on this one.

dthree
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  • Which SSDs are you planning to use? That's going to be a very important decision here. – ewwhite Jan 19 '16 at 19:08
  • I'm not sold on anything. Do you have recommendations? – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 19:30
  • Well, for SAS multipath to work, you'll need SAS SSDs with dual-ports on each disk. – ewwhite Jan 19 '16 at 19:39
  • Okay, got it. What sort of SSD models do you suggest (don't have an extraordinary budget)? – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 20:02
  • If you're in the US, I can help with pricing. The D2700 is very inexpensive... ($800 or less). For SSDs, how much capacity do you need? – ewwhite Jan 19 '16 at 20:06
  • Very little, maybe 800GB - the most important thing I want is ridiculously high IOPS, and obviously read/write along with that. Write is more important than read. I expect over 500 clients to write large amounts of small files with regular consistency and this is where my current storage is failing. – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 20:23

1 Answers1

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I'd really recommend period-correct HP JBOD enclosures and gear if you're doing this.

The HP D2600, D2700, D3600 and D3700 are the right tools for this.

For interfaces, you'll want an HP HBA in each server. The G6/G7 and Gen8 should use different HBAs.

The cabling will be SFF-8088 for the D2x00 and SFF-8644 for the D3x00.

There's a lot more to this... especially if you want high-availability to actually work. Can you elaborate on which SSDs you're planning to use?

ewwhite
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  • Thanks! I'd like to keep this question to this point, but I'll probably ask more for other things! Really appreciate the advice. I was looking at the HP D2700, however these enforce RAID, and so apparently you'd have to hack it with single-drive RAID 0s on every drive, which seemed weird. I could be wrong. – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 19:30
  • That is incorrect. You can use an HP D2700 with a SAS HBA and it operates as a JBOD. – ewwhite Jan 19 '16 at 19:31
  • Oh nice! Something like this (for a G7): http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04111002.pdf? – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 19:32
  • On the D2700, there's two ports for an SFF-8088 cable. What's the rule on this? Does one card cover half of the 25 bays? – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 20:39
  • @dthree See: http://serverfault.com/a/500439/13325 and http://serverfault.com/a/461977/13325 – ewwhite Jan 19 '16 at 21:07
  • Thanks - very helpful. I guess I should probably throw the card (HP H221 HBA) in my G8 then (has a PCIe 3.0 slot) to overcome the 4GB PCI 2.0 bottleneck? – dthree Jan 19 '16 at 21:33