 So I'm here for more systems and we're going to talk about XC P and G the Dell R6 30 a reviewed and how we configure storage on it If you want to learn more about me and my company over to Lauren systems calm If you'd like to hire short project or say hires button up at the top if you like to support the channel in other ways There's some affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about Including a deal and discount code for tech supply direct where we purchased quite a few servers You don't have the budget for the newest and greatest server You can get a really good deal on a use server that has been certified refurbished and put together and tested by the folks at Tech Supply Direct and for the offer code we have which is linked down below Put that offer code in and get 10% off your total purchase I've already done a video reviewing the hardware of this Dell R6 30. This is has dual Xeon e5 2680s at 2.5 gigahertz 128 gigs of DDR4 RAM, but we're gonna focus on of course the storage and the physical drives So this has four of these seagate nitro 960 sass drives though They're quite fast have an excellent maximum transfer rate here and they are configured in the raid 10 So we have four drives and they're spread across which means I can lose up to one drive now Raid is not a backup. We do have hourly snapshots That move over to the other server for redundancy. I've done videos on doing disaster recovery with XEP and G So I'm not too worried about it I was looking for performance and for the amount of BMs that we have to run here. This works perfectly fine There's excellent reliable drives. Now. How are they configured? Well besides raid 10. They were controlled with and we'll go over here with the H 730 mini embedded integrated raid controller now for XEP and Jeter's different ways you can handle this This is a raid controller with 1 gig of RAM that I ordered with this particular Dell server And I wanted the iDRAC system to handle the rate what this does is presents to the XEP and G system One single drive with a capacity of just about 1.8 terabytes of storage So this is a single drive presented and we load the OS on there And then we go over here to the storage we look at it it is formatted in EXT format and Has one point or one point six eight terabytes free the other part was used for the OS itself. So now the OS itself is presented and Has the single drive, but it's actually a radar right behind the scenes being handled by the iDRAC The reason I do it this way versus having XEP and G handle the rate array directly by passing the drives through is I wanted The iDRAC controller just to take care of everything and I can get all the information and notices and monitoring via that So any alerts or problems that occur on the system whether it be the hard drive or any other system like a power Spy failure, I'll get notified from the iDRAC This also allows me not to have to worry about setting up raid via the pass your drives with the XEP and G server Yes, it does support it But then you also have to build monitoring around it as well in it So, you know fairly command line driven and there's a little bit more technical detail in setting it up that way now Obviously my preferred storage as I've done videos on this is free to ask when you're doing a Large storage volume for data storage. I do prefer ZFS, but for the case of this running local storage works perfectly fine so Next thing to talk about is Performance the stats and that's really what matters is what kind of IOPS do you get out of here? And it's actually really a good performer here. So this is what read IOPS These are right IOPS and I was running these tests and only swing it back over here I was running these tests in the background and I didn't want to run them Just raw on the server I wanted to run it after I loaded Zen Orchestra after I loaded all the tools and got things and other Virtual machines running because that to me is a more realistic test because someone will say well You're just exhausting the cash running some of these tests and you're gonna get some unrealistic numbers Yes, but I'm also running several VMs at once and we're gonna cover that in a second to get the other side of it So here is the read for one gig files 16 megabyte files and 64 gig files. You can see the performance is actually quite good on the drives here So definitely no problems doing this now like I said, I'm not running this alone So I'm gonna kick this off again. I'll let this one run and you know, like I said, we're getting about 30,000 IOPS here from the the back end of it now if we go over here now and look at the hosts and then I I mean look at the VMs so we can now narrow down which hosts are running on here We have the Debian jumpbox the unify this windows server eval I loaded windows server in here So that seems to be where more people have questions about how does it perform with windows and xo communities Server this is the actually what you're logged into right now and seeing is the zen orchestra server that runs on this box as well And my zab x system is running on here So these are all actively using the drive and you know Taxing it at some level not a lot because those aren't really very demanding things But the windows server is especially when you're doing this so We'll go back over here to storage And we'll see how the performance is so here's the stats and here they are ramping up because of the back end You know being hammered quite a bit and we're seeing some really fast transfers out of here so 1.2 gigabit of transfer and They're all put right here 651 pretty steady. What I wanted to do was we go over here And I've been running some more iot tests. So we want to run multiple iot tests at once So while that iot test is running we're going to kick off another iot test to try to Eat this up a little bit more and see what kind of performance we get if this becomes unusable So this is still running in the background here And then we can go over here and Open up the server manager. So you can see the system is completely responsive even though Go back over here to the storage again storage Even though the storage is you know seeing quite a bit of use right now And I have this one reading it. I have the devium assistant reading it We can see the iot wait time is going up But it has no problem balancing all of this and you know playing nice I could say with I should say with all the other vm's plus the things that are running in productions Like the unify and stuff like that. So while this is going to take a little while to complete Each one of these tests for the read and write test It's not a problem on there And that was one of the things I wanted to just point out was when you configure the storage and present it this way It's really handy because now I have redundancy on the installed version of xcp and g So the base operating system has redundancy. There's redundancy for the Uh local vm's that are running on here for local storage And I still have the option for running ice guzzie or any other External storage that share between the two servers that we have in here And I have both my servers set up this way So if you go back over here to my storage pools, you this is the r720 local storage The r720 same thing has more drives in it and it has spinning drives in there Which are a little bit slower, but you're able to see That we have no problems running them like this and it's kind of the general way I configure it Because a lot of this comes up when you're setting these up should I pass all the drives through And if you have a drive or have a system, I should say that doesn't have a raid controller at all Yeah, absolutely build out the raid you can even build out zfs inside of xdp and g But presenting it via the del system And if you have one of the faster like I do in this particular machine 12 gigabyte backplane with the iDRAC and let it handle it and present to there that works out really well Now if there's some of the other servers that I use in my lab Sometimes I just take and build a mirrored set of drives just for the operating system And we've done this for several clients because what happens there is you're building a mirrored set for the operating system So I have redundancy in the os install of the base xcp and g But then all of their other storage is Attached to a sand and not local to the machine itself So just mirroring it's fine because the performance of the actual xcp and g not that really big of a deal So in terms of the operating system hypervisor is not where you worry about performance But it does matter a whole lot on how you present it to the vm's but running it locally. Like I said, it's very fast It's very efficient. Um, you get with the ext storage on there I'll go back to the storage on here when you're set up ext. It does do thin provisioning So you're not taking up too much space the snapshots and everything worked perfectly fine Lvm is the other option when you're setting it up. I haven't really seen any performance differences through my testing Maybe I'll do another video on that if if there's enough demand for it Where I put the two of them side by side just takes a lot of time to load these and build it out with lvm And then reload it and build again with ext. I haven't had any performance issues with the ext though And we're achieving right here pretty consistently about 30 000 i ops on this machine running everything at once And it's still staying responsive So hopefully this video helps and clears a little bit that up for how the storage is configured But you can see even with two things demanding the storage at the same time plus the other production things that are running on here We're still able to completely Not break anything I should say and get really good stats and numbers out of this All right, if you have questions comments or concerns leave them below or perhaps on the forums where I can have a more in-depth discussion I'll leave links below that and of course links to the hardware review itself And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to laurance systems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos. 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