Advice: SharePoint 2010 using SAN storage for SQL and VMs

Question

I have a Dell MD3200i SAN with one MD1200 expansion chassis. I have two RAID 10 LUNs devoted to HyperV VMs (1.25TB each) and one RAID 10 LUN is devoted to SQL 2008 R2 (I'll be upgrading to SQL 2012 in a few months). I have 4 available 450GB 15K SAS drives between the two chassis (plus 2x450GB drives I'm using as hot spares). We are using SharePoint 2010 to store Team Sites and My Sites and in the near future a lot of data is going to be uploaded to these site collections. I currently have 1.25TB of storage for SQL so I will most likely need to add a lot more storage.  I'm planning to purchase another MD1200 and add 12 RAID10 900GB 15K SAS drives. I would use that 5.4TB of storage as a SQL LUN and repurpose my current SQL LUN as VM storage.

Should I make one big 5.4TB LUN and make my SQL virtual cluster the owner? Should I carve it up into several LUNs and put different content databases on different LUNs? Is there a best practice on this or does it not matter?

Answer 1

Hiya,

It really depends on what your expected read/write I/O will be.

A general rule of thumb is that the more spindles you can provide your storage with, the better it will perform.

Answer 2

It would probably be better to split that drive array into at least two six-drive RAID 10 arrays.  This would allow you to split out some of your busier content databases to separate arrays for performance reasons.  You might also want to check out the following article as the same rules apply to optimizing SQL for Sharepoint:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966534.aspx

And you may want to verify the disk partitions have been configured properly as it can create a significant gain in performance per the following article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814%28v=sql.100%29.aspx

Hope this helps!

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-Chopps