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vmware esx physical server nic and hard drive configuration

hi there,
I'm in the process of getting hardware to virtualize all servers with vmware ESX for a company. Looking to get a server with 2 x quad xeons, 96GB ram and space for 8 drives (thinking 600GB 15k SAS) all in 1 box
How many NICs would be sufficient and wondering what is the best practice in configuring the drives?
Looking to have the best possible I/O and performance - currently thinking of a RAID50
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Or is having a SAN a way to go?

Also does it make sense to have a file server in a virtual environment or do people find it better to leave them on dedicated hardware as there is high I/O?

Thanks,

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Paul Solovyovsky

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andrew_transparent

ASKER

I'm not sure how many IOPS i'll need... as much as possible? I will be looking into this.
It is an esx infrastructure with Windows server OS's
There will be a 2 database servers running MS SQL
DC
Exchange server
Terminal services with approximately 100 users
A few dedicated client OS (win7)
debating whether to virtualize a file server or just leave alone on dedicated hardware
there will be CAD drawings that can get large and such

There is already a couple ESX servers running on hardware that is over subscribed which we will be moving off of to this new one and consolidating a couple of physical machines to vm's

Just to confirm RAID10 looks to get the most performance and reliability over a RAID50?

Thanks,

Paul Solovyovsky

With Terminal Servers/Citrix I typically like to spread out the load. Normally you can't get as many users per server but you can have more servers. Depending on apps you may need to reserve memory to avoid drops/latency. In this case the SAN becomes a good investment as you can spread the load across multiple TS servers and ESX hosts.

CAD applications take a heavy hit on the performance, I usually keep the server physical or get a SAN with CIFS capabiliteis.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

RAID 10, and put all your disks into the same RAID group.

How many NICs you have depends, if you want to team all your NICs, for management, and virtual machines, so maybe a minimum of four, but if you are going to use iSCSI, vMotion, because those ports also team require another four.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

100 TS users, personally I would not virtualise it, otherwise you will need 4 or 5 x Terminal Servers to take the load, and you'll then need to load balance them, using Citrix or 2X.

otherwise two physical servers will take the load nicely.

andrew_transparent

ASKER

Thanks!