How to partition my Hyper-V

[Disease]

I am using hyper-V to set up a virtualization server with an aim virtualise my servers.

It's a HP DL385 G7 with 2 16 core AMD's (32 cores!!) and 32gig Ram, the drives I have are 4 160GB SFF drives 3 questions:


1. How many servers do you think this will run, DNS, TMG, AD, AV-Server etc?
2. How would you partiton the drives, would you raid the lot, 2 mirrors, or 1 mirror and 1 larger logical drive?
3. Say don't do that, use it for something else you maniac!

Cheers

[jamesfed]

What is the speed of your drives?

We have a pair of HP 165 G7s with a single 8 core CPU - it runs at less than 20% cpu usage most of the times so the 32 cores would be a bit of overkill (although we are looking at one of them to expand our VDI server side kit).

[AButters]

Nice spec on the server. Shame about the storage!!!

CPU wise if your only running light load servers such as "DNS, TMG, AD, AV-Server" (i.e no terminal servers or SQL servers) then you could probably get away with 1 core per VM, so up to 32 VMs. I would start off with 1 core per VM and then see how it goes, if you identify a VM that uses a lot of CPU add another core (or 3).

RAM will be your limiting factor, based on 4GB per VM you can run 8 servers maybe 9 at a pinch.

One thing I would say is if your thinking of using 2 x mirrors with only 4 x 160gb drives you'd better have pretty empty servers to virtualise as that aint much space!! With only 4 drives, i'd go Raid 5 so you'll end up with 480GB of reasonably realiable, reasonably fast storage.

Remember, each AMD core is far slower than an intel one, so 32 x AMD cores is about equal to 12 x physical Intel cores (plus hyperthreading).

[Disease]

The Drives we ordered to kick the system off (they are 7200rpm) with a view to adding larger capacity ones later when budgets allow.

[jamesfed]

Some on here might say that 4x7,200 rpm drives would be ok (and to some degree I would agree in that we have a simlar setup) however after spending so much money on the server (in the CPUs ect) it is a shame not to see a few 300GB 15k drives in there for OS partitions of your servers.

Personaly I see it as-
SSD - Expensive but perfect for OS
10/15k - Use for OS partitions only
7,200 - Use for data partitions only

Anywhos I would put the drives in a RAID5 array (max storage that way with redundancy) - assign 40 GB to the Hyper-V OS partition (could get away with a little less if you use server core/hyper-v server) and then the rest to your VMs.

We quite hapily run 6 VMs on a server with those kinds of drives but you should look to get some faster drives.
The CPU and RAM arn't going to be the bottleneck in this case.

[SYNACK]

I'm hoping the drives are SAS, they are going to be your biggest bottleneck by far so running something like exchange or a DB server on there is going to kill performance and most of the space. For lite stuff you should be good for 8 or so but running anything with more substantial you'll probably be hitting disk IO limits. It all depends on the kind of load it will be running.

[Disease]

I was going to initially put in some bigger faster drives and SSD for the OS but it is a HP server so I had to get HP drives. I did not want to take the chance that non HP drives would screw it up, HP SSD's are fortunes!