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Trying to find advice about an upgrade I want to do.
I'm looking to setup the main system to better accommodate VMs, a simple AD domain environment, 2-3 win2k3 vm'd servers and a vm'd workstation or 2 (~5 total? definitely won't be on all the time). Its currently using vmware server hosted on Win7 64-bit.
Current specs: c2d e8400, 4gb ram, and a pair of 5400rpm 120gb laptop drives in raid1 (wanted it quiet as its in the bedroom and redundancy was an issue, but I maybe picking a nas to stash in the closet to handle storage/backup).
Getting 4gb more ram right off the bat. But probably the bottleneck right now is the drives. I was considering going the full SSD route, 1 for the host OS and then 2 in a raid0 for the datastore. I'm concerned about longevity though - read/write limit and .vmdk size might be taxing? Also, since this is also my main pc, I'm worried that the all the small, frequent random write ops doing usual computer stuff would could ruin them too?
I guess the other option is to just break the raid1 mirror and convert the two drives to raid0 and maybe just pick up a single SSD to host the OS. While its lots cheaper and I'm not worried about the read/write longevity, I might be asking alot hosting 3-5 vm's on 2 laptop drives?
Thoughts?
I'm looking to setup the main system to better accommodate VMs, a simple AD domain environment, 2-3 win2k3 vm'd servers and a vm'd workstation or 2 (~5 total? definitely won't be on all the time). Its currently using vmware server hosted on Win7 64-bit.
Current specs: c2d e8400, 4gb ram, and a pair of 5400rpm 120gb laptop drives in raid1 (wanted it quiet as its in the bedroom and redundancy was an issue, but I maybe picking a nas to stash in the closet to handle storage/backup).
Getting 4gb more ram right off the bat. But probably the bottleneck right now is the drives. I was considering going the full SSD route, 1 for the host OS and then 2 in a raid0 for the datastore. I'm concerned about longevity though - read/write limit and .vmdk size might be taxing? Also, since this is also my main pc, I'm worried that the all the small, frequent random write ops doing usual computer stuff would could ruin them too?
I guess the other option is to just break the raid1 mirror and convert the two drives to raid0 and maybe just pick up a single SSD to host the OS. While its lots cheaper and I'm not worried about the read/write longevity, I might be asking alot hosting 3-5 vm's on 2 laptop drives?
Thoughts?
