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Best Hyper-V performance with 6 hard drives?

I'm in the planning stage for a new server for 10 users. The server will have 6 drive bays.

How should I build the array(s) to achive best performance with 6 x SAS 15k drives?

I need arrays/partitions/vhds for the following systems:

    Hyper-V host (Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition - not a domain member)
    virtual Server 2008 R2 + (second) DC / DNS / DHCP
    virtual Server 2008 R2 + Exchange 2010
    virtual Server 2008 R2 + SQL 2008 R2 (light usage)

Should I use a single RAID 10 array with two partitions (first partition: Hyper-V host / second partition: fixed size VHDs)

Or is it better to use RAID1 (2 drives) for the host system + RAID10 (4 drives) for all virtual systems (fixed size VHDs)?
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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As for how you divide up the disk into partitions, for isolation, between OS and VMs, keeps the partitions less fragmented, but each partition still has the advantage of fast underlying RAID 10 storage.
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Thanks for your warning. I will have a look at the IOPS subject and reconsider the amount and speed of the drives. I wanted them to be extra fast, because the hard drives always were the bottleneck of my previous Hyper-V setups.

Could you explain why 6 drives in RAID 10 will sextuple the IOPS of a single drive? Is there no "overhead" and only 3 usable drives for write operations?
You are correct that each write IO will generate two physical writes to disk, but every read IO is only 1 physical read, and it is generally reads that slow down systems. In addition, write cache on a battery backed RAID controller will buffer any writes.
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exexc

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Thanks for your suggestions and representations. This will help me to do some more specific research.