VM Client OS Storage Large Raid Pool vs Small Pools Ea

Hardware Hub Storage
1

So I am new to Multi VM hosting.

Have A ESXi box up and running , wanting to run A few Always on VM threw it. (not all up an running yet)
PFsense, FreeNAS, Win 10, Steam OS, Ubuntu and Parted Magic (last one only runs in ram)

Not sure what the best practices would be for I/O and Safety.

Should Ea VM have its own HDD/SDD or would it be better to make one Large Raid 50 pool.

Right now I have Built in P410i that can do RAID 0,1,5, 10 and 50 (up to 8 drives).

What I am doing right now.

2x 16gb Sandsik SSD RAID 1 ( ESXi Host)
2x 32GB Sandisk SSD RAID 1 ( FreeNAS VM)
2x 300GB SAS HDD RAID 1 ( Win 10 / ISO)

I can already tell that I am going to want to Change out for some Better SSDs for the win 10 VM, (HDD +Raid 1 is slow)

I read that Raid 1 slows everything down, but if I were to throw A stripe into it would gain some speed. Thats where Raid 50 comes it ( not going too do 10 ).

This will leave me with one big pool of space .. .if All VMs are on the same raid , running at the same time .. how will the effect ea other.

Side questions.
15k HDD 146gb (cheap) vs Cheap 3D TLC 120gb SSD (https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-SU800-128GB-3D-NAND-ASU800SS-128GT-C/dp/B01K8A29BE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1492892552&sr=8-2&keywords=ADATA+Ultimate+SU800%5D)

15k 146gb .. Pros Cheap $15.00ea , Cons USED HDD and slow vs SSD
SSD. Pros way fater, Cons ADATA ? , Less Space, x8 = $$$$

Raid 50 vs 60 ..
Read everywhere not to use raid 5 / 50 and use raid 6 / 60. Should I just get Raid card that will do Raid 60 ? .. cost about $100.00

Thanks Neko

2

My suggestions based on my home-lab environment (just a developer that sometimes need few virtual machines):

I read that Raid 1 slows everything down, but if I were to throw A stripe into it would gain some speed. Thats where Raid 50 comes it ( not going too do 10 ).

In general RAID 1 with respect to write performance behaves like single disk (since it need to write the same data to both disks). Reads can theoretically be faster as two disks with the same content could be used to read the data.

This will leave me with one big pool of space .. .if All VMs are on the same raid , running at the same time .. how will the effect ea other.

They will affect each other when two or more VMs are doing reads/write at the same second. Its generally the same as for any kind of resource in virtualized environment. Or running multiple programs on the same OS.
Having larger storage area instead of multiple dedicated onces (e.g. per VM) is in general beneficial for any kind of changes in the storage sizes for each VM. Only when some specific workloads are done on the VM with the respect to the resource (e.g. storage), some dedicated allocation is done. E.g. when you have a database that constantly modifies thousands of records per second.

You also could explore possibility of SSD caching that is build into ESXi (not sure if you are using free or commercial license). Basically if you want to accelerate reads you can dedicate full or part of SSD(s) for a cache (I do not remember if there is a write-cache possibility or not) and assign some portion of that cache for each VM individually). This feature depends also on version of ESXi (and probably license type).
But for such setup you would probably need vCenter (I had no experience with the new standalone configuration tool ESXi has now, so I cannot tell if it allows to configure that details about ESXi host).

15k HDD 146gb (cheap) vs Cheap 3D TLC 120gb SSD

ESXi as any custom OS/hypervisor is very selective about hardware it supports. Usually dedicated solutions like ESXI (that does virtualization and nothing else) is also used with specific subset of hardware (similar as FreeNAS - some SATA controllers do not work at all).
Specifically I had experience with cheap SSD drive being recognized and used by ESXi 5.x and not being recognized at all by ESXi 6.x. Even if it would be recognized as a drive it might not be recognized as SSD. I simply do not know how it will be with ADATA.

Raid 50 vs 60 (5/6)

It is all about how important is your data vs cost of using more resilient solution.
To be honest, if what are you doing is not so critical, you might be even better with all RAID0 storage and one 2TB drive for VMs backups.
Mainly because regardless of how resilient your storage area is, all data should be backed up in two different locations 60 miles away, from each other, and from main storage - just in case of nuclear explosion :wink: