Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of dirkdigs
dirkdigs

asked on

building new virtual machine.

i am building a new virtual machine using server 2008 R2. the hyper-v server has a local 1 TB raid 10 volume used to store the VHD's.

What would be a good hard drive config to use. I would like to have a c: system partition and a data  partition. d: drive. should i use 60gb fixed VHD for the system dirve and a differencign vhd for the data with no limit ?

thanks.
Avatar of Dave Stringfellow
Dave Stringfellow
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

It depends on the data you will have on that, but if you are happy to let it grow till its full, thats fine. There is no set way to setup VHDs you need to plan how much data you think you need, and set to that. You only have a limit to the size of your physical  hard drives in this case :)
Avatar of dirkdigs
dirkdigs

ASKER

should i use 1 vhd for each partittion or just one for both. what are most people doing ?
SOLUTION
Avatar of Dave Stringfellow
Dave Stringfellow
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Mohamed Khairy
Mohamed Khairy
Flag of Egypt image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
i'm building a file server.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
@ kevinhsieh:

what is the difference with the IDE and the SCSI if my VHD files are both going to be on my RAID 10 volume any ways. Thanks. Performance improvement?
There is a performance improvement when attaching drives to the synthetic SCSI adapter because it doesn't have to go through the emulation required to present IDE to the VM, and because the SCSI specification allows greater performance when there are multiple concurrent requests.
@ kevinhsieh:

are you sure about that? i was jsut using atto disk benchmark and i was getting better read/writes from my system partition. IDE.
Upon further research, it shouldn't matter too much, but SCSI is still (slightly) better for I/O intensive workloads and multiple concurrent requests.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/12/01/why-hyper-v-cannot-boot-off-of-scsi-disks-and-why-you-should-not-care.aspx

"There are two limitations that remain for IDE disks:

•Disk commands to IDE disks on the same controller are serialized by the guest operating system (note that you can only have two IDE disks on a single controller)
•The IDE disk is limited to I/O block sizes of 512kb or less – while the SCSI controller can go up to block sizes of 8mb
However I have yet to see a test where either of these limitations resulted in a noticeable performance difference between IDE and SCSI."
This question has been classified as abandoned and is being closed as part of the Cleanup Program.  See my comment at the end of the question for more details.