checking the setup of your discs

  • I need to check what disc configuration we use to store our log files and data files. We use a third party cloud company to host our servers and i want to check that things are set up for optimal performance.

    When i log onto the server and go into computer managment i just see 'basic disc 100gb' for the disc that hold my log files. If it was using RAID would it show up here ?

    When i go to 'My Computer' and click on the properties of the same disc then click on the harware tab i see something different:

    Floppy disc drive

    NECVMWare IDE CDR10ATA....

    Then under that 3 virtual disc which say:

    VMware Virtual disk SCSI DISC DEVICE

    VMware Virtual disk SCSI DISC DEVICE

    VMware Virtual disk SCSI DISC DEVICE

    If i then click on each of these and click properties, i see:

    device type: Disc drives

    Manufacturer (standard disk drives)

    Location Location 160(BUS Number 0, Target id0, Lun 0)

    Each one reads the same, except Target Id changes with each disc ( 0 - 2 )

    Can i tell from this what RAID (If any ?) is being used ?

  • The VMWare virtual disks will sit on a VMWare ESX datastore, this itself may have a RAID array underneath it, but it wont mean a blind thing to you or your VM.

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • So are you saying there is no way to check what raid levels i have configured ? Do i just have to take our suppliers word that we have a raid config setup ? Is there no way to verify ?

  • You'll have to work with the vendor to either supply you with the information of how your system is configured, or get them to give you read privileges to the underlying hardware in order to query how it's configured for the VM. It's unlikely they'll do that since it could expose other customers configurations to you.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
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  • PearlJammer1 (7/31/2013)


    So are you saying there is no way to check what raid levels i have configured ? Do i just have to take our suppliers word that we have a raid config setup ? Is there no way to verify ?

    You can check with your VM admins but at the end of the day its meaningless to your machine. They're VMWare provisioned flat file virtual disks, the datastores underlying RAID config will not apply directly to the VM disks!

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • They're VMWare provisioned flat file virtual disks, the datastores underlying RAID config will not apply directly to the VM disks!

    Forgive my ignorance here.....

    Can you explain this ? Are you saying the raid config is not applying to my Transaction Log drive as this is a vm disc. So therefore we dont get the performance hit on our log files ?

  • Unless the disks have been presented as Raw Device Mappings to the VM then no, the VMWare kernel would be controlling access to the flat file virtual disks.

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

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