New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

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xkelly
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New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by xkelly » Mon Jan 25, 2016 1:49 pm

Hi-

Getting ready to purchase a new primary Win 2012 R2 server (E5 CPU, 16 GB RAM) that will host Medisoft Network Pro v19. It will also be used to host Quickbooks Enterprise and manage file/print share tasks. The old server (an aging Dell R320) is configured for RAID 1 for the OS and RAID 5 for document data.

Any problems with doing RAID 5 for both the OS and file data on the new one? There would be about 5 users hitting both the billing module and Office Hours, with another 10 hitting OH only. I'm trying to optimize the number of disks in the new system, but don't want to perceptibly impact performance.

Also, I'm thinking this would be a good opportunity to shift the office to ESXi. Any thoughts on performance hosting Medisoft in a Win VM on ESXi?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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Gavin Walker
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by Gavin Walker » Tue Jan 26, 2016 12:35 pm

The server you suggest will be more than adequate. We host ours on Hyper-V, so there is no reason why ESXi won't work.
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xkelly
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by xkelly » Thu Jan 28, 2016 2:11 pm

Thanks, Gavin. How about moving from RAID 1 to 5?

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Gavin Walker
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by Gavin Walker » Thu Jan 28, 2016 3:23 pm

The RAID level you chose is transparent to Medisoft. So are far as Medisoft is concerned it doesn't care whether you have RAID-1 or 5. You setup RAID to protect against hardware failure so the answer to your question is going to depend on how many hard drives you are going to throw at it.

RAID-1 - requires at least 2 drives and all the drives are mirror copies of each other. So, if you have 3 drives configured RAID-1, then you have the capacity of 1 drive, but 3 exact copies of it - pretty safe. Writing will be the time it takes to write info to all 3 drives, but reads can go to whichever of the 3 drives will be ready first.

RAID-5 - requires at least 3 drives. Info is stripped across all the drives with parity info written to one of the drives. So if you have 4 drives, you will have the capacity of 3 of the drives. This is a nice trade-off of drive capacity versus hardware failure protection. There is some CPU time to calculate the parity information, but this is usually handled by the RAID card. Also, the capacity of the RAID-5 will be larger than the drives you are using to make it with, so that can be a nice benefit. Writing will be a little slower because info must be stripped across all drives and you have to write the parity, but it won't be as slow as RAID-1. Reading will be a little faster, because all the drives are working together, but RAID 1 will be a little faster on the reading.

If you are looking at it from a pure performance criteria, RAID-1 is going to be faster because Medisoft reads about 10x more than it writes. You might also look at doing RAID-10 which is kind of a nice medium between RAID-1 and RAID-5.

xkelly
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by xkelly » Thu Jan 28, 2016 5:19 pm

Right, thanks for the response. I understand the concept and architecture of various RAID levels. I should have been more specific in my question: from your team's experience, if migrate the medisoft install to RAID 5 from RAID 1, will users experience any notice impact in medisoft performance?

Thanks again.

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Gavin Walker
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by Gavin Walker » Fri Jan 29, 2016 3:12 pm

No, and especially not on the server you mention for only 15 users.

xkelly
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Re: New Server Storage Array Reccomendations...

Post by xkelly » Tue Feb 02, 2016 4:54 pm

Good news. Thanks for the tip.

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