Hyper V server

Badfish · 7 Apr 2010 at 13:48

Hi

I am looking at getting a couple of servers for Hyper V server, but am having some problem deciding on harddisks. I dont know if 15k SAS drives would be best or whether SSDs would be better? :confused:

I read SSDs can burnout fairly quick if you write to them loads, and I would guess a Hyper V server running 8+ virtual machines will write a lot to the disks?

What I'm planning on going for so far is:

Windows 2008R2
Dual Xeon E5570 Quad Core processor
24GB Ram
2x146GB SAS disks for OS/programs
then need around 1TB for virtual machines.

Thanks for your help

Solaris · 7 Apr 2010 at 13:57

Swap is the only really disk IO intensive task that an OS performs. Might be worth keeping any swap / application cache on SAS drives and then OS data on SSDs.

That said I work as a UNIX administrator for a large Blue Chip company, and we don't have a single server with a SSD in it.

walnuts · 7 Apr 2010 at 14:58

Recently purchased Dell PowerEdge R710 to run Hyper-V and in the end went with 6 * 450GB 15k SAS drives.

I'm currently running 6 virtual machines and not had any disk performance problems. Disks were so fast I ended up using RAID5. You can look into RAID10 if you plan to run anything that's disk intensive.

bigredshark · 7 Apr 2010 at 15:24

Solaris said:
That said I work as a UNIX administrator for a large Blue Chip company, and we don't have a single server with a SSD in it.

I'd back that up, we have close to 20k servers deployed now...and not a single production box with SSD. Our database guys demanded it a while back but when somebody actually looked at the workloads there's no good reason...

Badfish · 7 Apr 2010 at 16:15

To be honest I've been thinking the same thing, just stick to the usual disks for now. Also SSDs that come with servers are rediculously priced and its not really worth it.

Thanks for your thoughts

Solaris · 7 Apr 2010 at 16:16

bigredshark said:
I'd back that up, we have close to 20k servers deployed now...and not a single production box with SSD. Our database guys demanded it a while back but when somebody actually looked at the workloads there's no good reason...

Haha our DBAs did the same thing, someone actually laughed at them in that meeting, which sent a chain of giggles around the room....

Was pretty embarassing....

bigredshark · 7 Apr 2010 at 17:44

Solaris said:
Haha our DBAs did the same thing, someone actually laughed at them in that meeting, which sent a chain of giggles around the room....

Was pretty embarassing....

I'm fairly sure it's happening everywhere

'we need SSDs for greater performance'

'have you actually tried optimising your database in any way?'

'but SSDs are so much faster'

'as is a correctly optimised database. And it's free of capital expenditure'