Storage Requirements

An everRun system has the following storage requirements and recommendations:

• Each physical machine must contain at least two physical disks.
• Stratus strongly recommends that your system use a storage RAID controller.
  • If the system has a single logical disk, Stratus strongly recommends that you configure the RAID controller so that logical disks presented to the host are backed by redundant physical drives.
  • Stratus strongly recommends that RAID controllers have a battery-backed write cache.
  • You must configure the RAID controller to boot off the first logical disk.

Disk drives support standard format, 512e format, and Advanced 4K Native format with sectors, as follows:

Stratus recommends using disks with the 4K sector size for better performance. When using 4K storage, observe the following restrictions:

• Each storage group must contain logical disks of the same sector size. For example, you cannot add a 4K logical disk to a 512B storage group.
• The sector size of a storage group is automatically defined by the sector size of the first logical disk that you add to the group. After the sector size of the storage group is set, you cannot change it. You would need to create a new storage group with logical disks of the new sector size.

• Because the sector size of a storage group affects the sector size of your VM volumes, it is important to plan your storage groups carefully:

  • A storage group with the 512B sector size supports only 512B VM volumes.
  • A storage group with the 4K sector size supports 4K or 512B VM volumes.

  Note that the boot volume for each VM must be 512B, regardless of the storage group's sector size. Only data volumes can use the 4K sector size. Ensure that your guest operating systems support 4K volumes before creating or attaching them.

When planning your system configuration, confirm that your storage configuration meets these requirements and then return to Site and System Preparation.

Related Topics

everRun Storage Architecture

Managing Logical Disks

The Storage Groups Page