Disk Preparation for a SharePoint Setup

This is my guide to getting disks configured and ready, prior to a SharePoint farm setup. My example here covers a small farm implementation, that consist of an Application Server, a Web Front End Server and a Database Server.

Why would I need to do this? For redundancy and having some form of failover in place.

Please note, that this is only a recommended guide and is not by any means written in stone.

Disks required:

1. OS Disk – The install and default location of server Operating Systems.
2. Apps Disk – The install location of additional applications, such as SharePoint.
3. Logs Disk – The location of various logs (e.g: IIS logs, SharePoint logs, and on the Database Server the SQL logs .ldf)
4. Data Disk – The location of all SQL data files .mdf on the Database Server.
5. Index Disk – The location of SharePoint Search Index and or Query content.

Application Server

For the above, we could easily have our OS and Apps on one single RAID 5 volume. As for the Logs disks, it is assumed that a daily backup process is in place, and that we are not overly dependant on every single log.

Web Front End Server

As with the Application Server, we could have our OS and Apps on a single RAID 5 volume. As for the Logs disks, it is assumed that a daily backup process is in place, and that we are not overly dependant on every single log.

Database Server

As per-the previous two, we could have our OS and Apps on a single RAID 5 volume. But, we would definitely need redundancy and performance on our Data disk and Log disk. This is why RAID 10 is the recommended configurations for these 2 disk volumes.

For all of the above, a hardware RAID solution is preferred, as opposed to the Windows software based solution. The hardware option incurs no overhead on the server’s processor(s). And it is also easier to manage and maintain.