HPE Storage Users Group

Curious what RAID levels others are running with similar setups? I have read that RAID1 offers the best peformance of course, and with the 3par architecture is is a suitable solution for vmware. I am just curious about the cons and what others are doing?

Is RAID1 too big of a risk for data loss or downtime? Are the performance gains worth it vs RAID5? Any information you can provide about your vcenter environment and how you present your LUNs is appreciated.

Are you using an AO? If you are not tiering data then unless you have I/O sentivie apps or databases then I would stick with RAID 5. We use AO and I have 23 tiers:
RAID 1 FC 15K
RAID 5 3+1 FC 15K
RAID 5 5+1 NL 7K

We have no databases in these tiers so we find that the majority of the data sinks to the NL drives with the percentages running about

10%
30%
60%

This is 700 VMs occupying about 62TB of capacity.
Your mileage will vary, but I see little reason to allocate all VMs to RAID 1. We also use the middle tier as the default landing zone.

If you do not have AO then I would say RAID 5 with 3+1 or 5+1 drive set. There is a 3par paper that shows the degradation of performance from optimal (RAID1 ) down to I believe RAID 6, I have attached another document that describes their implementation and why the penalties usually associated with certain raid sets are minimized with 3par.

We will implement AO once we receive our SSD drives, but for right now we just have all 600GB FC disks. We do have some more I/O intense databases, but they currently reside on shared datastores where we just have manually balanced the load for now.

We have a V400, 2 node array with ~35TB.

With the Thin Suite we are doing very well on allocation. I am just curious what cons come with this? How many disks can I lose? If performance is better RAID 1 then why NOT use it?

You can still do AO with one drive size, just tier between raid types. If you look at my example, 2 of our tiers are on 15K FC drives, we have a RAID 1 CPG and RAID 5 so that hot data rises and stale data sinks. All but 2 of our databases servers are in AO., but on our database servers the default CPG is RAID 1 so that net new blocks land on fastest tier.