Question : Hyper-V RAID Recommendations

I'm going to be building a new Dell R710 (Dual Quad Core processors, 24GB of DDR3) to virtualize 3-5 lower end physical servers that I have, and decided to use Hyper-V. This will be my first experience with virtualization in a production environment, and would like some real world recommendations.

I'm going with the Dell PERC 6/i SAS RAID Controller, but due to the large amount of space that I require, SAS drives are just going to be too expensive, so I'm thinking about going SATA. I'm planning to do a RAID 1 mirror for the host OS, then a 4 disk RAID 10 to house all of the virtual machines.

First question is concerning my choice of RAID setup, is this optimal? My other concern is using SATA instead of SAS drives. The servers I'm virtualizing are pretty low end, so I don't need massive I/O performance, but I don't want this setup to be anywhere near slow. Can anyone comment?

Answer : Hyper-V RAID Recommendations

If you can get SAS, that will be a good one ;

Further, make sure that the vhd's are on seperate partitions and their config files take up space when you switch the vm on, it creates the ram in the config file (you would know that) - so make sure your partitions are planned properly.

As for your DB if you think it will grow and access would grow too then do a physical pass through for your DB that will give you more IO power for the db.

RAID 10 would be a good option for the VM disk partition

You can use a tool "quickvhd" to create vhds in a flash, make sure you create fixed size vhds as they give better performance

You can use wim2vhd to create sysprepd windows 2008 / windows 7 vms straight away from the install source

You can create a sysprep'd virtual machine of Windows7, WIndows Server 2008 R2 (ONLY) via WIM2VHD

QuickVHD : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vhdtool

WIM2VHD : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx

http://4sysops.com/archives/free-wim2vhd-convert-a-wim-image-to-a-vhd-image/ (article on how to convert a wim to vhd - only valid for server 2008 r2 and windows 7 ) very  useful for quickly creating vms instead of installing everything.

Once you have created your vms and have installed the Operating system, I would recommend to install updates etc and sysprep and shut down, then copy that vhd over to a external storage for your backup / disaster recovery reasons, so if you have to create a new one you would just need to attach one new vm and thats it.

RAID 10 for VMS and if any IO intense db then physical pass through

You can even combine IIS and WSUS on one VM and set the WSUS synch time to something during the night when your network activity is really low.

Hope this helps - sorry for the delay in getting back.