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Should I configure RAID before hand

We are going to set up a 3 node cluster with some older hardware and I'm wondering should I let Petasan handle all the disks individually and create one large volumne or should I create one giant volume from the Perc card to present on each server to PetaSAN?

Our goal is to present a single iSCSI volume to one server for some backup storage for a SQL Server. We are looking to preset the biggest single volume possible to only 1 server. Just wondering what best practices are for this and what dos/donts I should know before starting.

Servers are Dell R730xd with 24 2.5 ssds, along with fusion cards used for caching? We've also got a couple of nvme drives we can throw into 2 of the 3 servers. What would be better for cache and the journal?

Is is better to not use RAID create as many OSDs as thete are disks. With some controllers, if you they have battery backed writeback cache it may be useful to create single volume RAID 0  disks so you can make use of controller write cache.

You can create iSCSI disks in PetaSAN up to 100 TB each. If you need larger you can manually create the Ceph rbd image then from cli then attach it to PetaSAN iSCSI via the UI, but cannot really recommend creating larger than 100 TB disks, some environment like VMWare may have a limit like 64 TB. You can also create several 100 TB from UI then RAID them at the client. In all cases, the system is thin provisioned, you can create more iSCSI storage than physical storage and can add physical storage as the iSCSI disks fill up.

If you have SSDs, recommend you use them as external journals.

Excellent, thank you for the information!