I'm kicking myself right now because we bought a couple of new servers to use as Xenserver 6.2 hosts. Two HP DL360e G8 servers. They are entry level, but have a good amount of resources. However, I've come to find out that the raid controller that comes with these servers aren't supported by Xenserver. They are dynamic controllers that pass off the RAID algorithms to the OS (calling them hardware raid controllers is a farce and I'm pissed at HP as much as I am myself).
Our options are to spend some more money and buy supported raid controllers or disable the raid controllers in the BIOS and not worry about RAID. We are not using local host storage for VM storage, we have an iSCSI SAN for that. We have 3x 300GB 10k SAS drives on each host. I am thinking 1 drive for the Xenserver OS, 1 for utility storage (ISOs, etc) and 1 as a backup location for block level backups of the OS drive using dd.
Basically we just want to protect the host configurations, knowing the VM HDDs are stored on our SAN. Is this plan sane or am I being an idiot?
[link][7 comments]