ML115 & Hyper-V Disk Setup

**ba55meister** · 30 March 2009, 16:33

what are you planning to use there VMs for ?

**NoddY** · 30 March 2009, 17:31

Originally posted by dandcg View Post

Need some advice regarding best way to setup the disks on a home server setup.

I’m planning on getting a ML115 Quad Core Opteron G5 and 8Gb ram to go in it, then to run Windows Server 2008 as the host with Hyper-V and file server roles enabled. The guest VM’s can then access the shares made available by the host.

My original plan was to buy 4 1Tb drives and run them on a RAID 5 array, partition a small section of for the host OS and then put the VHD’s on the other partition along with the data shares.

My problem is I have read the may be issues with disk bottleneck if I do it this way. Can anybody give me any pointers?

How about mirroring the host OS and the 'important' stuff i.e. data on disks 0 & 1 and storing the VMs on a stripe set (disks 2 & 3)? Should be quicker and *almost* as safe (should disaster strike you would lose the VMs - but the shared/important data is still on the mirror).

**JoJoGabor** · 30 March 2009, 20:07

It really depends on how disk intensive your VMs are going to be. If you are using SATA drives, you may get 60 IOPS per drive. In a RAID-5 setup this will give you 180 IOPS. Unless you are exposing your fileshares to many users or you are running IO intesive apps on your VMs this should be enough to run your VMs. AS a comparison I can run about 2 VMs without noticable degradation on my laptop using VM workstation, and that is a single 7200 SATA disk - around 60 IOPS.

RAID-5 the whole lot and split into 2 partitions, 1 for OS and one for VHDs

ML115 & Hyper-V Disk Setup