Microsoft Dynamics GP System Requirements: Drive (RAID) Configurations

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Posted on by Lisa at AonC.com

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Per the GP system requirements following are the recommended disk configurations:

RAID 1 for operating system and applications (2 disks)
RAID 5 for SQL database log and data files (4 disks)

Is there a reason why versions of GP running on SQL Server 7 and 2000 recommended RAID 10 and newer GP system requirements do not? (I see RAID 10 dropping off GP 2010 with SQL 2005/2008 system requirements.)

With the move to virtualized servers, I rarely get asked about physical hardware servers so I'm a bit rusty on RAID configurations. (Most articles about this are several years old. I know the value of SSD, but am fuzzy on the State of RAID.)

The specific query from one of our GP clients is what RAID configuration they should deploy for an HP ProLiant DL380 with P408i-A RAID controller and 480GB SATA RI drives. (They prefer to move away from RAID 5 due to concerns about drive loss during rebuilds.)

Looking back in prior GP system requirements 15+ years ago, I find RAID 5 (8 disk minimum) or RAID 10 was recommended.

What happened to RAID 10 as a recommendation?
Where does RAID 6 fit into this?
If the RAID is hardware-based, wouldn't any RAID configuration be supported?

I appreciate any insight hardware-savvy members can shed on this.

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Microsoft Dynamics GP

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Beat Bucher GP Gee... 28,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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RE: Microsoft Dynamics GP System Requirements: Drive (RAID) Configurations

Hi Lisa,

I concur with Derek on this one.. Personally I'd guess that those specs were inherited from the old days where you still had 'physical' HW for your servers running SQL & GP, thus it make big sense to use RAID disks.. Nowadays with virtualization, not so much anymore.

But the true point is what Derek emphasized on: the partition setup for the SQL server databases.. I see too many customers that don't pay attention to those little details and setup their enviornment with only 2 disks: 1 primary for the OS and 1 large (usually 1TB) for the SQL databases.. It certainly is going to work, but you run your production on a risky setup (single data structure from the OS perspective) that might break in case something goes havoc on the OS side (thruth be told, I've never seen it ever since I started using virtualization)..

Microsoft's recommendation about seggregation of data disks is more about avoiding your disks getting filled out by TempDB overflow of Transaction Logs that grew out of control due to improper backup settings or jobs (could simply be failing without being noticed).

HTH

PS: not saying RAID isn't used anymore today, but it's handled by the underlying host infrasctructure that manages all your disks (SAN, NAS, whatever you call it). Certainly disks are still redundant today, but no longer does the OS have to deal with it using dedicated RAID controllers and drivers (which was another point of failure)
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Derek Albaugh on at

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RE: Microsoft Dynamics GP System Requirements: Drive (RAID) Configurations

My best answer would be that what is mentioned in the 'System Requirements' documents for each version of Dynamics GP are 'minimal specs', meaning more of a starting point, then you go from there.

In the performance white paper for Dynamics GP >> https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/UK/GP/learning/documentation/white-papers/MDGP2010_WhitePaper_Performance >> it mentions the following as well:

Isolation of the database files

Log Data Files (LDF)

It is recommended to always isolate the Microsoft Dynamics GP database log files on a dedicated RAID 1 or RAID 10 volume. This is to ensure that SQL Server can always write to the log file as fast as possible with no contention from the MDF Input/Output (I/O) activity. This will have a positive impact on the performance of SQL statements (inserts, updates, deletes) in the database because SQL Server can continue to the next statement as soon as the log is written.

Master Data Files (MDF)

It is recommended to always isolate the Microsoft Dynamics GP database data files on a dedicated RAID 5 or RAID 10 volume. Ensure you have adequate disks to handle your I/O load, otherwise latency will increase once the disks are saturated.

TEMPDB (MDF and LDF)

It is recommended to always isolate the TEMPDB database files (MDF and LDF) on a dedicated RAID 1 or RAID 10 volume. Performance may also benefit by creating 1 data file per CPU for TEMPDB as recommended in the article below.

That being said, I'll admit to not being a RAID expert either, so there may be others here in the Community that has more information on what they've had experience with.

Thanks,