When building a SANless SQL Server cluster with SIOS DataKeeper, or when configuring Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server, you may consider striping together multiple disk in a Simple Storage Space (RAID 0) for performance. This is very commonly done in the cloud where each instance typically his backed by hardware resiliency, so RAID 0 is not really all that risky.

For instance, I had a recent customer in AWS that wanted to max out his IOPS to 80,000, the maximum IOPS currently available to a single instance. Now keep in mind, only the largest EBS optimized instance sizes supports 80,000 IOPS, so you want to make sure you know what maximum IOPS your particular instance size supports.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSOptimized.html

In this case we had ac5.18xlarge instance which does support 80,000 IOPS. However, any individual EBS Provisioned IOPS volume only supports up to 32,000 IOPS. The only way to achieve 80,000 IOPS when writing to any single volume is to strip three of these volumes together in a Simple Storage Space.

Herein lies the rub, if you try to do that in an existing cluster things are going to go haywire pretty fast. Fellow MVP Joey D’Antoni recently blogged about the issue and it appears to still be an issue in the Windows Server 2019 preview.

Just as Joey suggests, I always advise my customers to build out the nodes and any Storage Spaces BEFORE they start the clustering process. This makes the process go much smoother. It also allows the customer to have some time to benchmark the server’s performance before they add any replication, to  ensure everything is working as expected.