I'm going to be building a new Dell R710 (Dual Quad Core processors, 24GB of DDR3) to virtualize 3-5 lower end physical servers that I have, and decided to use Hyper-V. This will be my first experience with virtualization in a production environment, and would like some real world recommendations.
I'm going with the Dell PERC 6/i SAS RAID Controller, but due to the large amount of space that I require, SAS drives are just going to be too expensive, so I'm thinking about going SATA. I'm planning to do a RAID 1 mirror for the host OS, then a 4 disk RAID 10 to house all of the virtual machines.
First question is concerning my choice of RAID setup, is this optimal? My other concern is using SATA instead of SAS drives. The servers I'm virtualizing are pretty low end, so I don't need massive I/O performance, but I don't want this setup to be anywhere near slow. Can anyone comment?
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
I will be virtualizing a print server, WSUS server, IIS Server, and a SQL server with a very small database and very low load.
25 users will be utilizing them
The host machine will likely be running 2008 core with nothing else running on it
I could stretch it with SAS, it's just those 500GB SAS drives are off the chart expensive, especially when I need 4 of them for the RAID 10
I think the SATA will work OK since it is low utilization. The problem is you won't have the scalability needed should it come high. Our typical setup for our Hyper-V hosts is Raid 1 (15k 73GB SAS) and then RAID 10 (146GB x4 if 3.5" x6 if 2.5"). I have tried RAID 10 and 4 drives with Hyper-v and splitting partitions and it works, but not recommended. If you can't afford all 6 drives SAS, then I would go SATA. 6 is better than 4.
That will be the most scalable solution.
As for the partition I did it when I had an old Dell that had only 4 drives. I put the 4 in RAID 10 and made two partitions one for the OS and one for Data. It got me by, but having 6 drives (or even 8) is a much better solution. Not only do you get to skip the partitions but your performance is better.
If you can get SAS, that will be a good one ;
Further, make sure that the vhd's are on seperate partitions and their config files take up space when you switch the vm on, it creates the ram in the config file (you would know that) - so make sure your partitions are planned properly.
As for your DB if you think it will grow and access would grow too then do a physical pass through for your DB that will give you more IO power for the db.
RAID 10 would be a good option for the VM disk partition
You can use a tool "quickvhd" to create vhds in a flash, make sure you create fixed size vhds as they give better performance
You can use wim2vhd to create sysprepd windows 2008 / windows 7 vms straight away from the install source
You can create a sysprep'd virtual machine of Windows7, WIndows Server 2008 R2 (ONLY) via WIM2VHD
QuickVHD : http://code.msdn.microsoft
WIM2VHD : http://code.msdn.microsoft
http://w
http
Once you have created your vms and have installed the Operating system, I would recommend to install updates etc and sysprep and shut down, then copy that vhd over to a external storage for your backup / disaster recovery reasons, so if you have to create a new one you would just need to attach one new vm and thats it.
RAID 10 for VMS and if any IO intense db then physical pass through
You can even combine IIS and WSUS on one VM and set the WSUS synch time to something during the night when your network activity is really low.
Hope this helps - sorry for the delay in getting back.
Fixed Size VHDS :-) don't forget
As CAGdorf has also mentioned, if you were to run a db which will be IO intense then a physical pass through disk is recommended ;
Best of Luck
Also, plan your Hyper-v Networking as well properly just to avoid any problems in the future ;
http://blogs.msdn.com/vir
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: mutahirPosted on 2009-11-07 at 04:58:22ID: 25766133
What sort of servers you are virtualizing ?
File servers ? Exchange ? SQL ? DC?
How many users accessing it ?
Would the host machine have any role other then hyper-v ?
Is there no way you can stretch a little bit and get the SAS drives ?
I will be able to suggest more once I have that info requested above ; I have recently done a hyper-v install for two or three clients and in house
they were SQL Server (we used a physical pass through of raid 10 for database
dev machines running win2k3 etc
it all comes down to budget and requirements