Setting up VMs on Single HDDs

[Chuckster]

I've been told that if I wanted to virtualise a couple of servers, e.g. 3, the best route is to have 4 HDDs for your server.

 

The first is to install your OS on it and then give the remaining 3 HDDs a VM each. This way there is less disk activity going on and if you end up putting a few VMs on a single HDD.. it will run really slow.

 

So really, what I've been told is not to bother with RAID5 or whatever, just install the HDDs as normal and use WM Server 1.0.8.

 

What would your recommendation be and why?

[FN-GM]

I would say that is bad advice.

 

Myslef if you could only afford 4 hhds set them up on raid 5 then use that arrary for both host and VM. That way you have more redundancy.

 

z

[Domino]

Where did you get told that......?

[tonyd]

I suppose we really need to ask what the purpose of the virtualisation is. I.e. are you looking to use the VM'd servers for production roles, or are they simply a testing environment?

 

For production usage, I would definitely agree with the previous poster that redundancy of drives would normally be essential. I can think of very few situations I would consider installing a server that did not have some sort of RAID, having experienced a great many hard drive failures over the years.

 

For testing usage, where there are no critical systems, then maybe you would get better performance using a disk for each VM. This would be an unusual configuration though, since one of the advantages of virtualisation is the ability to share resources, i.e. additional disk space!

 

Also, I'm hoping you mean VM Server, I've never heard (nor has google!) of WM Server... Not sure what the reasons for not using v.2 are though.

Edited January 28, 2009 by tonyd

[Butuz]

My Reccomendation would be using VMWare ESXi 3.5 (it's free and you don't need to install a Windows O/S to run the VM's on) and configuring the 4 drives of the server into Raid 5.

 

Not using RAID on any production server is totally bonkers, and if it is going to be a mission critical production server - the person that told you above should be ignored from now on!

 

Butuz

[dodben]

Set it up RAID5 as others have suggested. This will also give you redundancy in case a disk fails.