Question : Help with Hyper-V Planning for Intel Modular Server

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to get some assistance on how to best design & revamp our entire organization with Hyper-V. Some questions I have are not Hyper-V specific as well. Think of this post as being able to give your input on how to best design & optimize an entirely clean slate of a network, as we'll only planning to migrate data over from our old servers.

Through some research & vendor talk, here's the list of the fun new hardware & software I've obtained:

Intel Modular Server Chassis MFSYS25
2 Compute Modules (blades) MFS5520VI
Both Modules have 2 Xeon 5520 CPUs & 16GB of 1066 DDR3 RAM
Currently have 7 SAS 10k disks
Intel Shared LUN Key
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise (gives us 4-5 virtual server licenses)

I have many questions bouncing around my head, but let me toss a few on the bigger ones out, and perhaps everything else will become more clear as I move along during testing.

1)   I am totally unfamiliar with clustering, of any kind. I do have a partition that has a shared LUN on the chassis level, and I see the disk marked as offline on both of my 2008 Enterprise test servers. What do I need to do now to enable that partition as a shared volume or cluster between the 2 servers ? Also, I'd like to toy around with Hyper-V clustering, so I can see how it works and then decide if & where it makes sense for our infrastructure.

2)   I am very concerned about overall disk I/O. There will initally be about 5 servers running off these 7 disks. I have the ability to purchase and make it 8 disks total, if that helps with a better overall RAID solution, for maximizing I/O performance across the board. The server types will be a couple of DC's, a file server, a SQL server, and an Exchange server. This is to support a LAN of about 60 users.

3)   How do I setup the fixed size VHD's & disk partitions for maximum performance ? Do I need to worry about certain data types being on RAID1 vs RAID5 vs RAID10 ? Split the OS partitions from data partitions, even if they are on a VHD ?

Even though I'm a bit fuzzy on certain areas of this project right now, I learn quickly by testing things out, and am very excited to start!

Thanks

Answer : Help with Hyper-V Planning for Intel Modular Server

1) Sorry, no experience with clustering.

2) Best performance is from RAID-10, since you read from 4 drives and write only to two. 8 drives give you two RAID-10's, so I'd go for the extra drive, and split your VM's on the 2 volumes.

3) Just use RAID-10 for all disks, and balance the VM's according to the most intensive use, e.g. if mail and filesharing are both heavily used, store their VM's on different volumes.

If you split the VM's in a VHD for the OS and a VHD for the data, you can easily create a new OS-VHD when one machine goes corrupt. Just copy the OS-VHD from a working machine, give it a unique ID and name, configure it with the data-VHD as second drive, and shut down the machine. When the original machine gets corrupted, you can quickly start the backup and you're up and running again.