Virtual server w/file server or dedicated file server?

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jmk396

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Jul 22, 2004
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Right now I'm running one server at home it has Hyper-V with several virtual machines including my file server.

The file server uses my Dell PERC 6i array and serves files to my network clients.

The virtual machines use a separate (shared) hard drive inside the server outside of the array for their operating systems.

I've thought about building an SAN (iSCSI) box but I'm not really sure what I would gain. It would let me fool around with ESXi (memory over-commit sounds great) and I wouldn't have to worry about my motherboard/cpu's lack of VT-d/IOMMU (direct access to my PCIe cards for my file server virtual machine).

How does everybody else have their home servers setup? Do you combine your file server with other servers or do you have it separated?

I'm not sure it's worth running another server just to serve files (and purchasing another motherboard, cpu, ECC RAM, etc).
 
FYI, Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V with the next service pack will allow one to over commit memory.

Three of my servers are set up with Hyper-V. I have at least 15 virtual servers that I use for development, testing and some production. In my experience one does not really need any kind of iSCSI system for this kind of environment. At the most one needs to dedicate a drive to certain virtual servers but even that is rare.

My biggest server is has an i7 processor, 12 GB RAM and hardware RAID (Areca 1680i) with a RAID 1 10K drive pair for hosting the file based virtual servers. I have 8 virtual servers running on this box so far doing everything from a dedicated system for developing enhancements to Microsoft Exchange to web hosting - and I have yet to come close to overloading the system.

My advice: Use 10K drives for the OS, 10K drives for file based virtual servers and 7200 RPM drives for data storage. If you use a virtual server for file storage put the OS on a file based VM and the data on a hardware RAID array using 7200 RPM drives. That way you can get to the data even if you trash the file server OS.
 
Thanks for all of the advice.

I've heard about the upcoming changes to Hyper-V and memory overcommit but I'm guessing it won't be finished for quite some time which is why I was looking at ESXi but that has serious limitations with large file systems.

Anyways, my current setup is similar to what you described but I have have two drives:

OS drive (500 GB SATA)
6 TB array

All of my virtual servers (including the host) are stored on the 500 GB drive. The 6 TB array is passed as a "physical disk" to a virtual machine acting as a file server. (eg. it has SMB shares, etc)

I'll have to check into 10K drives and perhaps splitting the Hyper-V host drive and virtual server VHDs onto another drive but I'll have to check into prices and see how much that would cost.

I was also thinking of a RAID 1+0 (or 0+1?) setup for the host/virtual-servers drive but that requires four dedicated drives and I'll have to upgrade to a true file server case (Norco 4220) if I want to do that which of course will require more money...
 
Virtualize it.

We have 400+ users at work. They have redirected desktops and my documents. The main file server is virtualized with Hyper-V. The box is a dual Xeon 5520 w/72gb RAM and 8 RE4-GP 2tb drives in RAID 6. We also have Exchange 2007 and about 15 other VMs on this box. No one has complained. All data is stored in VHD files.

The only real consideration is if you have video files on your file server. Then you want a seperate array for the data VHDs/LUNs. If you're running ESXi, then it might not matter as ESXi is a lot better at I/O management.
 
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I'm not as fancy as you guys are on this, but I'm using a Server 2008 R2 Box with just over 60TB attached running Hyper-V. In Hyper-V i'm currently using FreeNAS as the iSCSI target, WHS as my main backup and media point, and Ubuntu 10.04 as a file server I'm just testing out. One thing that can happen, especially with the FreeNAS VM is that if I hammer the CPU (Core i7-920) the network performance can plunge despite having at least 10 Intel GigE ports on the box. The legacy NIC does require some CPU time to be available.

Realistically though, I'm not worried even having that much data in VMs.
 
That sounds like a pretty nice setup... you don't consider it fancy?!

I do have one last question... I ordered a WD Raptor 150GB 10K drive but I couldn't afford two of them so I now have these three drives/arrays:

WD 500GB (7200 RPM)
WD 150GB 10K Raptor
PERC 6i array

What's the best setup? Should I install Hyper-V onto the 500 GB drive and then my virtual servers VHDs on the raptor? ...or should I share the 10K drive with the Hyper-V host and the virtual servers? (does the host even use any HDD resources?) Also, I'm guessing that it's fine just to format the 10K drive with NTFS and then use the file-based VHDs as the hard drive images for the virtual servers...
 
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