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Amiga-2000

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Running SBS 2011 with single dynamic disk for files

Hi

I've been reading up on the difference between fixed and dynamic sized disks when related to Hyper-V 2008 R2.

The blog consensus appears to be do not put your exchange on dynamic disks. What I am thinking to work around this problem is virtualised small business server 2011 with a fixed C drive for the OS, fixed 100 gig D drive to store exchange and SharePoint information. Then create a 600 GB dynamic disk to store the clients word documents etc.

The client only has around 80 GB of data (of the word, excel variety). Currently I have been testing the small business server with fixed disks across the board. What this means is the bare metal backup from the Hyper-V host is taking forever because there is a 600 gig disc that only contains 80 gig of actual data.

To cut a long story short I would be running small business server on fixed disks with the exception of Word documents etc residing on a dynamic/thin provisioned disks.

The client has around 12 staff and the disk subsystem is a Dell PERC spinning six 450 gig 15 k SAS so throughput is pretty good.

Looking for thoughts on this from SBS and virtualisation experts

thank you
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David
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Why not just buy a 128GB SSD.  Performance will be fantastic, and it won't make a difference how the SSD is configured, because it will still be the fastest VM you have by far ;)
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Cliff Galiher
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Amiga-2000

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Apologies Cliff for not being more detailed in my question. My focus really was on reducing the backup size of the bare metal recovery of the host . I'm absolutely backing up the guests with a mixture of 'virtual bare metal recovery' to each guest, file replication. On-site /  offsite data rotations for the VM guests, the backup is under control. My fault for not making this clearer