How much hard drive space for Hyper-V and 2 VM’s?

lumencreative · 26 Jan 2020 at 14:34

Sorry, I’m back with yet more questions.

I have decided that for our main server that I’m in the process of planning, I am going to get a couple of SSD’s in RAID1 for the Hyper-V (on bare metal) and 2 x Windows Server 2019 STD VM’s. The server will then have 6 x 900GB SAS drives in RAID10 for all data (folder redirection and file sharing).

So, I was offered a deal to get 4 x 100GB Intel DC S3700’s (with HP firmware) for £25 each but I don’t think 92GB (ish) will be enough for what I want, so might sell them on, and get some bigger drives but wondered how much space do I realistically need?

I’ve looked at our current setup and the VM that we don’t really use (has Sage installed on it still) uses 24GB, so arguably we could get away with a 100GB drive but obviously I want enough space to grow should I need it (although I could always upgrade the drives later).

Any and All advice welcome

LizardKing · 27 Jan 2020 at 16:14

100gb will be plenty for the OS and a few installed applications that can keep there data stores on a separate drive. Generally speaking SSDs are wasted on the OS drive but as there to small to do much else and the price is ok so long as they have plenty of life left in them.

lumencreative · 27 Jan 2020 at 16:33

LizardKing said:
100gb will be plenty for the OS and a few installed applications that can keep there data stores on a separate drive. Generally speaking SSDs are wasted on the OS drive but as there to small to do much else and the price is ok so long as they have plenty of life left in them.

Do you think I’d manage to get hyper-v and two vms on one 100gb drive?

Quartz · 27 Jan 2020 at 16:36

lumencreative said:
Do you think I’d manage to get hyper-v and two vms on one 100gb drive?

How much RAM are you allocating to each VM (for the pagefile size)? And wouidn't you be better off having each VM on its own drive or RAID set?

lumencreative · 27 Jan 2020 at 16:58

Quartz said:
How much RAM are you allocating to each VM (for the pagefile size)? And wouidn't you be better off having each VM on its own drive or RAID set?

32GB of Ram for each VM (which is way overkill but the physical server has 96GB in).

As one of the VM’s is going to be domain controller only, I was hoping to have both hyper-v and both os’s on one drive (which will be two drives in RAID1). The second VM is file/print server and all data will be on a separate RAID set (6 x 900GB SAS drives)....that’s the plan anyway.

Someone on another forum has suggested using ssds for the OS is pointless and said I won’t see any significant performance increase over just going with 8 x 900GB SAS drives in RAID10 and split the space into multiple VHDX’s as needed.

Quartz · 27 Jan 2020 at 18:50

lumencreative said:
32GB of Ram for each VM (which is way overkill but the physical server has 96GB in).

Then put each VM on a separate RAID pair.

lumencreative said:
As one of the VM’s is going to be domain controller only,

Do you really need 32 GB for a domain controller?

lumencreative · 27 Jan 2020 at 18:59

Quartz said:
Do you really need 32 GB for a domain controller?

Nope but I also don’t imagine needing more than 32GB for a file server, or am I wrong?

kinda new to this haha

Quartz · 27 Jan 2020 at 19:02

lumencreative said:
Nope but I also don’t imagine needing more than 32GB for a file server, or am I wrong?

I'm unfamiliar with Server 2019; I remember running NT DCs in megabytes, not gigabytes.

LuckyWig · 28 Jan 2020 at 17:26

The 8 x 900gb drives is a better option, the host OS and domain controller will be doing almost nothing most of the time anyway and this would give better performance for the file server. Does the server have a decent raid controller with cache?