Vista - Virtual Server Recommendations Wanted

I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with dual Quad Core 2.33Ghz processors,
8GB of RAM and 5 73GB SAS HD's. It also has a dual broadcom nic and a quad
intel nic. My goal is to migrate 2 separate SQL 2000 servers to it and
possibly a NAV server. The SQL servers would have 29 and 50 users
respectively and NAV would have 65 clients. Both SQL servers host databases
that are under 5GB each.

My plan was to have a 73GB mirror and then a 146GB raid5. I was going to
use Windows 2008 Enterprise x64 as a host on the mirror, and then have 3
Windows 2003 x86 virtual servers with the SQL 2000 servers & NAV server on
the raid. I would like them to perform as well or better than the hardware
they are being migrated from. (They are both being migrated from Dual Xeon
2.2Ghz machines, one with 2gb ram and the other with 1gb ram and SCSI hard
drives). I figure if I give each machine half a quad core and 2gb of ram,
it should perform just as well as the old server if not better. Am I right?

I am new to virtual servers and would like some criticism and
recommendations. I wasn't planning on using Hyper-V because I noticed that
it cannot be managed (or there is difficulty managing) it from Windows XP.
All of the workstations on my network are XP 32 bit.

Thanks in advance for all and any of your input.

This is definitely a job for Hyper-V. You can only give a single core to a
Virtual Server guest. With Hyper-V, you can give each guest up to 4 cores.
Plus the speed and efficiency is much better.

You don't need to worry about management, since you can manage them directly
from the Windows Server 2008 parent partition (host). And you can always RDP
into that from your XP workstations.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

"Adam" <adam@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eXIgXkbKJHA.1012@xxxxxx

If you are moving towards a HyperV host with only local storage I would even
consider using a complete RAID5 over your 5 disks.
I know it is not the traditional answer, but:
1. You would spread disk IO over 5 disks instead of 3 disks (where your VMs
live)
2. You only loose 1 disk

Consider using fixed vhd or even a passthrough disk if need for max
performance with SQL (eg: logs)
Optional: Consider adding some more memory, if sooner or later you would run
some other VM workloads on that box (which I believe sooner or later you
will do)... It's all about optimizing, right?

Hope this helps!

--
Kurt Roggen [BE]
http://trycatch.be/blogs/roggenk


"Adam" <adam@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eXIgXkbKJHA.1012@xxxxxx

Thank you both for your recommendations. I will take both advices and use
Hyper-V for my VM's and use all drives in a single array. Do you recommend
that I use software-raid or hardware-raid, considering the specifications of
the machine and the possibility that I would like to add more drives to the
array at some point?

"Adam" <adam@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eXIgXkbKJHA.1012@xxxxxx

hardware raid. I always recommend it in preference to software RAID.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel


"Adam" <adam@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:urnU1ogKJHA.5920@xxxxxx

On Thu, 9 Oct 2008 08:25:57 -0400, "Adam" <adam@xxxxxx> wrote:
How important is your data? If its not terribly important, go with
software RAID.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/