3Discovery
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Moving VM's pagefile to spindle HDD
Looking to convert low-use and non-critical servers, about 13 in all, from physical to a two-node clustered virtual host.
Some servers are small SQL servers, writing about 2-4GB of data a day. Some SQL servers are x86, so a 4GB limitation (due to running old software we intend to upgrade to 64-bit versions next year). Other servers are 64-bit with 16GB RAM.
Since SSD's are starting to get into reasonable price range, I would like to put all 13 on to several SSD's. I keep reading that it is highly recommended that the pagefiles for each server be put into separate vhd file and placed onto a separate spindle drive to save on wear to the SSDs.
This is a very small virtualization project for a small business. Sadly, there is no existing large scale virtual datacenter we could just pull these into.
So my question is, would two 300GB 15K SAS drives in RAID 1 be more than enough (performance-wise) to handle the pagefile vhd's for all 13 servers? Should I go with four in a RAID 10 instead? Two sets of RAID 1? Or am I going about this the wrong way?
Some servers are small SQL servers, writing about 2-4GB of data a day. Some SQL servers are x86, so a 4GB limitation (due to running old software we intend to upgrade to 64-bit versions next year). Other servers are 64-bit with 16GB RAM.
Since SSD's are starting to get into reasonable price range, I would like to put all 13 on to several SSD's. I keep reading that it is highly recommended that the pagefiles for each server be put into separate vhd file and placed onto a separate spindle drive to save on wear to the SSDs.
This is a very small virtualization project for a small business. Sadly, there is no existing large scale virtual datacenter we could just pull these into.
So my question is, would two 300GB 15K SAS drives in RAID 1 be more than enough (performance-wise) to handle the pagefile vhd's for all 13 servers? Should I go with four in a RAID 10 instead? Two sets of RAID 1? Or am I going about this the wrong way?
Cliff Galiher
Putting 13 swap files on what is effectively one spindle (raid 1 with 2 disks essentially performs at the speed of only one disk) will almost certainly leave that disk set I/O constrained. You'd be better off more slower disks.
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