All depends on how many IOPS you need, but if you are going to be stressing the array then I would use pass through disk access for the I/O partitions (not the guest OS partitions, but where you are doing to store the database and logs). That option gives you the best I/O performance.
Cheers Ken From: Durf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 6 October 2008 11:16 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Hyper-V Guest storage allocation options Got into talking with a co-worker about how best to allocate Guest OS storage from the Host OS's direct-attached storage in Windows 2008 Hyper-V. Assume a Windows 2008 Enterprise w/Hyper-V host and a couple of 2008 server standard guest OS installation with fairly stringent I/O options (SQL and Exchange). Let's say the host is a Dell PE2950 with internal mirrored 146GB SAS drives and connected to an MD1000 or 3000 external drive array (DAS not iSCSI) with a couple of TB of storage. Assume on my guest OS boxes I want to have one OS VHD and one data VHD where all the I/O intensive stuff happens. Assume SAS 10k RPM drives in all cases. Is the basic storage strategy simply going to allocate all of the disks as VHD and place them on one or more arrays mounted through the Host OS? or is there some more interesting way of mounting storage for the Guest OS's from the host OS that I should be looking at (raw disk mounting or iSCSI via the host OS?) Or just stick to creating a couple of RAID10 arrays for the Host OS data partitions, and just place each data-intensive VHD on its own array? -- -------------- Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks! ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
