Best practice for VM drive sizes
Hi Experts,
I need to know what the best practice is for larger hdd size & arrangements regarding virtual machines: is it better to have one large hdd (2 or 3 TB in capacity) and convert to GPT or is it better to spread the that total size (2 or 3Tb) across smaller MBR hdds (1TB, 500GB, 500GB, or 3 1TB hdds,)?
esxi 5.5
vcenter 5.5
server 2012r2
Thx.
I need to know what the best practice is for larger hdd size & arrangements regarding virtual machines: is it better to have one large hdd (2 or 3 TB in capacity) and convert to GPT or is it better to spread the that total size (2 or 3Tb) across smaller MBR hdds (1TB, 500GB, 500GB, or 3 1TB hdds,)?
esxi 5.5
vcenter 5.5
server 2012r2
Thx.
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What do you mean by 'I would not recommend the use of spanning across disks for Windows.'? For example, do you mean installing windows on c, e, and f?
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If you're running multiple VM's and they share the same physical drive, then as they do disk accesses you're "thrashing" the disk a good bit as it has to move between the locations of the various virtual hard drives ... this can be eliminated by having the different virtual hard drives on different physical drives => so it's much better to have multiple drives.
The exception is if you're using solid state drives, where there's no physical seek or latency to be concerned about. I keep all of my VM's on the same physical drive, but it's a 1TB SSD so there's no performance penalty.
The exception is if you're using solid state drives, where there's no physical seek or latency to be concerned about. I keep all of my VM's on the same physical drive, but it's a 1TB SSD so there's no performance penalty.
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sorry forgot to mention this is fixed storage not shared.
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is it a consensus that GPT is the future and I should build each disk that way, even the OS which is going to be limited to 60 or 80 GB and never grow to the TB range?
even the OS which is going to be limited to 60 or 80 GB and never grow to the TB range? Famous last words.. Future proof as much as possible, it doesn't hurt if you start off that way.. it is a pain to find out down the road that your estimates were in fact not reasonable. Or that requirements changed over time..
do you actually require a disk of over 2TB, if so what for ?
what is the actual free space you have at present ?
or is this just a hypothetical what should I do ?
what is the actual free space you have at present ?
or is this just a hypothetical what should I do ?
Just for informational purposes, even with SSDs, performance gains can often be seen when using multiple drives over a single larger drive. SAS SSDs are still insanely expensive, and SATA is still not always efficient. Even a high end single SATA-III drive is going to top out moving about 500MB/s while the underlying PCI bus could handle 6GB/s (capital B, not lowercase b) so a second SSD could be simultaneously reading and writing data as the first, since the PCI bus could move data to and from them faster than they can each handle individually. And thus you'd still see legitimate performance gains with two drives.
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@David - I don't see an os needing 2TB in the next 3 years. that is why I said that. I set os to 60gb in my template for the past 6 years and have never even come close to caps.
@Andrew - yes the requirement is for a ever-growing file server.
@Cliff - good point.
@Andrew - yes the requirement is for a ever-growing file server.
@Cliff - good point.
So create small and grow.
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Lee, Andrew, David, Gary, Diverse it, do you all create hdds in GPT as a standard?
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Thanks everyone!
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Just for clarification, I was talking about virtual machines on this post not hypervisors. I'm not sure that was understood by everyone.
this post was explicitly about the configuration of hdds for vms only - nothing to do with hypervisor hdd setup or config.
Did everyone understand that...forgive me if I failed to make this clear?
this post was explicitly about the configuration of hdds for vms only - nothing to do with hypervisor hdd setup or config.
Did everyone understand that...forgive me if I failed to make this clear?
Yep, I understood that!
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ok good...i'm glad. :)
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