If it were me, I would attempt to go with as much capacity, as at much speed, as you can get away with financially.
If you can get enough capacity in RAID10 (the most inefficient RAID type but the best performance) you've covered the worst case scenario IMO. You've also left yourself with the option to migrate RAID type downwards and gain capacity at the expense of losing some performance. My suggestion would be to create a few small LUNs to separate your VM's out and do thin provisioning of your VHD/VMDK's and expand the LUN and NTFS/VMFS as and when you need it - it's not perfect but it's probably the closest you'll get to a virtualised storage type setup without actually moving to a SAN. I'll stress I have no experience of hyper-v, so whilst I'm assuming the above holds good for hyper-v, I'm typing it with vSphere in mind simply as it's what I'm familiar with. ________________________________________ From: Ben Scott [[email protected]] Sent: 02 December 2011 9:46 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Virtualization - Sizing, hard disk config On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Paul Hutchings <[email protected]> wrote: > Trust me on this, when you have vmware/hyper-v you will find yourself > standing up VM's > all the time for testing/application isolation and all sorts of things that > you just couldn't > do with a physical box* Oh, I have no doubt about that. We use VMware on the desktop now for testing. My thinking was that we could start off with what we need now, plus a reasonable margin for growth. If we outgrow it somehow, we can add more then. Adding RAM is trivial. > My gut reaction is that something like a Dell R510 stuffed full of SAS > drives and > a good RAID controller, running in RAID10 would give you a hell of a lot of > grunt > for not a lot of money. So the thinking is that it's better to have a bunch of fast drives in a single big RAID 10 array, then. That was one of my original questions -- what's better, that, or dedicated mirrors of larger slower disks. I'll spec the R510 out, too. We just got a 19" rack for our server room. Heck, we just got a server room -- a few months ago, it was also my office! :) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin -- MIRA Ltd Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 VAT Registration GB 100 1464 84 The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of the intended recipient. If you receive this e-mail in error, please delete it and notify us either by e-mail, telephone or fax. You should not copy, forward or otherwise disclose the content of the e-mail as this is prohibited. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
