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Hyper-V .vhd placement

bigdogchris

bigdogchris

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Feb 19, 2008
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Hello. I am receiving a new server which I plan to use for virtualization and would like some tips on placement of the .vhd's

The server has 8 drive bays, which I will use 15k SAS 6GB/s disk with an Adaptec RAID card. My plan is to install Server 2008 R2 Ent onto a RAID 1 set, then use the remaining 6 drives to create a RAID 10 set for data. These servers will not have a heavy work load but I would like to make an optimal configuration with what I have.

My question is, should I create 1 partition on the RAID 10 set, then create all 4 .vhd's in this partition, or is there a better way to handle this?
 
You're not going to gain anything by partitioning, my vote is single.
 
With 15k's in a RAID10 set, you'll have plenty of disk I/O. I'd be more concerned with capacity penalty of RAID10. You mentioned that the servers won't be high demand, might adifferent RAID level providing more capacity be a better choice?
 
Unless your VMs will be writing a lot going with RAID 10 will offer minimal gain.

However, I would advise against RAID 6 with your 6 drives. The write penalty from the dual parity would be fairly severe depending on how much write cache your RAID card has. If you expect the VMs to do very little writing at all, then RAID 6 would work OK.

A 5+1 RAID 5 or 4+1 RAID 5 + HS would probably be best.
 
One partition for the RAID 10 and put all of the VHD's in there.

Will the VHD's be fixed size or dynamic?
 
The VM's I put up will be put in place for specific roles so I expect to just use a static size since I know their storage needs will not be increasing over time. There is one of the VM's which may end up being dynamic since it will hold a CMS webserver.

The server will have 6 300GB 15k drives, so I will still have 900GB available even in RAID 10, and only need 50GB per server. I've never been a fan of RAID 5. Is it better for a VM for any specific reason other than you don't lose as much disk space?
 
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I am not a fan of RAID 5 either but it has its uses and in every case you have to evaluate what you will be doing with the storage, what your expectations of recovery and performance are, etc etc.

At any rate it all depends on what your VM's will be doing. I've got 15 2008 vm's on a 600gb 15k raid 1, no issues but those are very light use vm's. I've got one vm on a 4x600gb 15k raid 10 because it is a much busier VM as far as hdd activity goes. Wish I had a nice san but no budget for that.
 
I just reread this post, I must have misread in the beginning..I thought you were going to create separate partitions for each VM..lol.

Anyway..yeah..it really depends on the workload and capacity pertaining RAID level.
 
Vader said:
I just reread this post, I must have misread in the beginning..I thought you were going to create separate partitions for each VM..lol.
Click to expand...
I wasn't going to but was willing to listen to any advice if someone said it was a good idea. I can't imagine why you would want to but wanted to ask none the less.
 
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