Which RAID Level Should We Run For Virtual Machine Storage

Solution 1:

Generally I'd expect Raid 10 to show a decent performance boost over Raid 5, but the answer to any question like this is "Test it yourself and find out, because it depends on your exact circumstances, so no one here can give you a definitive answer".

Solution 2:

My rule is RAID 10 everywhere, anything else is a compromise - not that I don't have to, or choose to make compromises but my default is always R10 - great protection and performance.

Solution 3:

We are talking up to 100% faster (and more!) in terms of RAID modes.

RAID write penalities (for one write IO bing issued to the host - how many disk (read and write) IOs have to be issued to the disks at least):

• RAID 10 write penalty: 1
• RAID 5 write penalty: 4
• RAID 6 write penalty: 6

It should be noted that if your application and file system is tuned for the proper block size of your RAID stride then RAID5 and RAID6 can even outperform RAID10 given the same number of spindles on write-heavy workloads.