Where to put virtual machines on server?

[VulcaN]

I installed the hyper-v stand-alone edition and got it up and running.

Is it recommended to put the virtual machines on separate harddrives? Right now I just have one created on the same harddrive that the hypervisor OS is installed on, because I didn't have a spare harddisk handy.

1) Im guessing I should put them all on separate harddrives so if one goes it doesnt take the other with it, and so the access times are better??

2) Is it a bad idea to put them on my RAID array where I will be storing files? (aka they should be connected directly to the mobo via SATA and not one of the harddrives on my SAS array?)

Thanks

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Putting them on hardware RAID...you have the protection/redundancy of RAID, in case one hard drive goes tits up everything will keep running.

However, in sharing a RAID volume in ESXi, if you start putting tons of heavy duty servers on the same volume, yes you will bog down that volume and have a negative impact on the performance of the other virtual machines running on it. So....you need to think, and spread the load. Make several hardware RAID volumes, and don't put too many heavy virtual machines on it. Spread the load as best you can.

 

[bearlevel]

Most of my guys are puting the hypervisor on dual 72GB RAID 0 and then loading the VMs on a RAID 5 stack. This way you get best performance from the VM software with the reliability of having your VM images protected and fault tolerant.