LENOVO PX12-450R RAID configuration + general advice

Question

I have a Lenovo PX12-450R NAS device with eight 3TB 7.2rpm drives. The device has a Quad-Core 2.5GHz Xeon CPU + 8GB DDR3 RAM. I have 4 gigabit NICS bonded. I am looking to use it to be a target for my backups from Veeam, to give my users shares to store their archive files, and possibly use it as a datastore for non-critical VMs. I have two questions:

Should I lump everything together and make 1 big RAID 10 storage pool and then create volumes for the items above or make two separate RAID 10 pools- one for backup and one for VM / file shares.
I will be migrating a WIN 2008 R2 file server to 2012 r2. The data VMDK with the file shares is about 1.5 TB. Is it a good idea to put that VMDK on an ISCSI datastore from the NAS and then put the OS on local storage of the server?

Thanks in advance!

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '16 at 13:05

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Q1: Should I lump everything together and make 1 big RAID 10 storage pool and then create volumes for the items above or make two separate RAID 10 pools- one for backup and one for VM / file shares.

A1: Yes, keep one pool and wrap logical volumes on top. If you'd create two separate pools / virtual LUNs you'll split your IOPS between both of them and it's not good. To keep data safe make sure you maintain multiple copies of it. Google for "3-2-1 Backup Plan".

Q2: I will be migrating a WIN 2008 R2 file server to 2012 r2. The data VMDK with the file shares is about 1.5 TB. Is it a good idea to put that VMDK on an ISCSI datastore from the NAS and then put the OS on local storage of the server?

A2: It's better to keep all content on the same place, and make sure this storage is shared. You'll be able to vMotion / Live Migration your VM to some other physical host if required. Splitting data between DAS and NAS only makes management complicated.

answered Mar 19 '16 at 13:05

BaronSamedi1958

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Yup, agree. Just want to expand this answer by dropping few useful links here – Anatoly Vilchinsky Mar 22 '16 at 10:43
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Here is pretty good explanation of 3-2-1 BAclup Rule: https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.com/explanation/the-3-2-1-backup-rule/ – Anatoly Vilchinsky Mar 22 '16 at 10:43
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On my experience Veeam worked pretty good for backups https://www.veeam.com/ – Anatoly Vilchinsky Mar 22 '16 at 10:44
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And StarWind Virtual SAN may be an option for running FT shared storagge https://www.starwindsoftware.com/ – Anatoly Vilchinsky Mar 22 '16 at 10:44

score -2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 03 '16 at 21:37

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We have it that way I have a raid 10 running 8 machines and 2 volumes running backup. so far with very good performance; you can use virtualization to take better advantage of this product.

answered Mar 03 '16 at 21:37

Ricardo Arias

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Thanks for the reply Ricardo! So just to be clear you have one big raid 10 and then different volumes for backup and VM datastore targets? – AK1512 Mar 04 '16 at 03:43
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I`m sorry, but that doesn`t answer to any of the asked questions – Anatoly Vilchinsky Mar 22 '16 at 10:40

LENOVO PX12-450R RAID configuration + general advice

2 Answers2