Charlie Russel - MVP wrote:
Quote:
> Yup, gives me a good picture.
>
> You're I/O bound. SATA drives are simply getting more than they can
> handle. Honestly, Virtualization is a great thing, but it seriously
> stresses the I/O subsystem. Then you've put all your stuff on the
> system drive, creating additional load. And finally, to compound the
> problem, you've got 4k clusters - I like something more on the order
> of 16k clusters or even larger on VHD storage.
>
> If you're going to use SATA drives, you've be FAR better off having
> more, but smaller drives, configured in an array. I don't know what
> your physical server looks like, but if you can put in an array of 6
> or 8 smaller SATA (or better yet, SAS) drives, you'll change the
> picture completely. To give you an idea, here's how my main Hyper-V
> server is configured. (It's an HP ML-350G5 with dual 5130 CPUs and a
> SmartArray P400 controller, plus an additioanl Adaptec SAS
> controller.)
>
> 2 - 36 GB SAS drives - RAID-1 - C: drive, system
> 2 - 320 GB SATA drives - RAID-0 - D: drive - temporary, disposable
> storage. ISOs, etc.
> 8 - 72 GB, 2.5", 15k SAS drives - RAID-5 - E: drive - my VHDs reside
> here.
>
> Even that isn't perfect - I'd do better with RAID-10 for the VHD
> drive, but it would mean swapping out the 72GB drives for 144's and
> the budget won't handle that right now.
Thanks for the info. I usually get DL380s which have better disk I/O
but I had to resort to using a DL145 for the virtual server.
Btw, how is easy/hard is it to move a VM to another physical hardware,
would it be just moving a few files (vhd, etc)?
Thanks.
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