Building Hyper V VMs best practice on Virtual Hard drives?

[MrWu]

Hi

 

How do folks build VMs these days?

 

I'm migrating to Windows server 2019 VM host, and at the moment building Gen 2 servers to replace ageing Windows 2008 R2 VMs

 

I used to build fixed hard drives for C: (OS) and D: (Server apps / logs / data)

 

Do you still follow this now? OR do you just have a C: drive / Dynamic Expanding?

 

I'm think in terms of storage space and performance in the production LAN, and fact recovery and backup of VMs are quite easy now, so maybe separating OS is unnecessary?

 

cheers!

[XiJ]

We have a VHDx for the OS drive. Usually dynamic. In our case that’s stored on ssd in the host.

Then we have a vhdx for data - expanding and large. That’s stored on hdd for us.

 

Primary school data from staff and pupils is fine on spinning rust in our use cases. But the ssd for the OS makes a massive difference of course.

[Jcx500]

Have a C: Drive only on Dc's and other servers such as npas and rds, have a D: Data Drive on servers such as, Data server, APP Server and sql servers, i keep my disks fixed size and expand them if ever needed

[localzuk]

As most VMs are "single purpose" on my network, we go with a dynamic expanding C only for the majority of roles. The only ones with an extra disk are things like our SIMS servers (as we follow our support team's guide for setup, so it matches the rest of the county), our data servers and our SCCM servers.

[dhicks]

I'm think in terms of storage space and performance in the production LAN, and fact recovery and backup of VMs are quite easy now, so maybe separating OS is unnecessary?

 

We're in what sounds like a similar situation to you - now creating new Hyper-V VMs on nice new hardware running Windows Server 2019 with Storage Spaces. For the new Domain Controller and print server I plan to simply have one virtual harddrive per VM, leaving Storage Spaces to handle optimising which bit of underlying storage hardware the data is stored / cached / mirrored on. For things like file servers, I'd probably separate the file shares off on to a separate virtual harddrive. In general, for data processing, my plan is to separate data and processing functionality by having source code in source code control and data in cloud-based file systems, so keeping local VM storage requirements quite simple.

[Guest Guest]

We have 2 RAID 6 arrays on each host, 1 with 6 SSDs mainly storing boot drives and DBs and the other 6 600GB HDDs mainly used for user data

[msi_school]

I try to keep my VMS "single purpose" for ease of management. Having had issues in the past with system disks running out of space I always provision a fixed C drive and then a separate fixed "data" for the application.

 

I realise that the separate disks are not necessary but I don't believe that it causes any harm. I try to only use fixed disks on production servers because it makes allocating space on the SAN easier.

[supportman]

We used fixed C drive of about 120gb on most machines, SSD local storage.

[PotNoodleTech]

VXD for C drive, separate VXD for D and E drive (if necessary). All stored on the same storage but having multiple drives makes it easier to expand/shrink them for specific purposes.

 

Many of my servers just have a C drive, but the ones with shared areas have a D drive and home drives have an E drive.

 

As an aside, as mentioned above, separate VXDs allow you to mix and match drives within a single VM on to disparate physical storage (based on drive speed or size). I haven't needed to do this as I am SSD only but if I did have mechanical HDDs in the physical hosts I would probably put shared area drives on the mechanical HDDs.