Re: Single RAID 5 for everything....

Thanks guys for the response. With regards to perfmon monitoring...thats one
of the first things I did so I could gauge the IOPS, which is realtively low
mainly due to the lack of utilization of the CPU and memory. The avg. CPU %
is 4-6 and I haven't gotten any paging errors or memory errors either so the
resource usage is low. Now on to the disk IO...the baseline # is 2 for avg
total disk queue...ours is constantly around 4-6 and my physicaldisk/avg disk
sec/read/write is over 50ms for the better part of the working day.
Maybe these are types of figures I need to keep putting in their faces to
get them to understand. Not to mention that since the server was rebuilt
back in June/July...they had a major weekend prior to my starting and a disk
on the exchange server failed on the reboot already.
To me its a no-brainer...but what do I know. :)

Thanks guys...anymore info. would be appreciated.

Ken


"Ed Crowley [MVP]" wrote:

Personally, I wouldn't bother splitting the page file from the OS because if
you're paging so much that paging disk performance is affecting overall
system perfromance, then you simply don't have enough memory. In an
Exchange server, you should be installing so much memory that Exchange
doesn't page--the extra memory is used for data caching, which doesn't page.
Instead, I'd add those two disks to the store volume so that you're striping
across more disks.

In addition, if you have a top-flight RAID controller (like HP SmartArray)
then RAID-5 can actually be more efficient because you'd be striping across
more drives. If you have enough users, you could possibly improve
performance by splitting your store and logs in two and building additional
RAID-1 and RAID-5 volumes for the logs and databases, respectively.

However, I cannot tell you that your disk performance is the cause of your
problem because I haven't seen any evidence to support that. You're going
to have to start collecting some Performance Monitor data to support that.
In the Microsoft Exchange 2003 Technical Resources web site there's a great
white paper that will help you determine which performance monitor counters
to use to troubleshoot disk performance.
--
Ed Crowley
MVP - Exchange
"Protecting the world from PSTs and brick backups!"

"kage13" <kage13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ED57988C-0C6E-4E15-A851-12A5E202C68D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
yup, that's correct. I have taken over for an exodus Exchange Admin at my
current employer. Sometime ago the previous Exchange server had a
catastrophic failure they ended up rebuilding the server and performing a
restore. However, instead of rebuilding the correct way, it was rebuilt
as a
poster child of what NOT to do...a single RAID 5 for everything.
I now have the task of arguing with mgmt. that this is not working, the
server is heavily taxed with I/O ops, client latency from Outlook, etc. I
have given my recommendations on how the server should be setup:
C:\ - OS; Exchange system files - RAID1 (on physical sever)
D:\ pagefile - RAID1 (on physical server)
E:\ Transaction logs - RAID1 (SAN)
F:\ Storage Groups - RAID0+1 (SAN)

and they are saying that this is overkill that it won't provide much more
than what they are currently getting! Can you believe this!
Anyway, has anyone had the same discussion with their ex/bosses and won
the
fight I'd appreciate any information you used for leverage. I'm about to
pull my hair out and just let the server go down in flames and wait for
them
to come to me fix it, with an "I told so!" from me.

TIA,

Ken




.

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