Virtual machines and storage advice

Vach · February 22, 2019

Hi all,

I am trying to run VMs (Hyper V or VMware doesn't matter, I have some experience with both).

I have the following hardware available

Ryzen R7 1700
32GB RAM

1 x 256GB SSD for OS

2 x 8TB for misc storage

LSI 9260-8i with

4 x 8TB in Raid 5
4 x 4TB in Raid 5

I do have a secondary machine that I could setup with an I5-4670 with 8GB Ram.

So what would be the best way to configure this for VM and storage?

VMs I would be using one of them as a media server and probably one or two more VMs as a gaming server for friends to logon to.

What would be the best way to set this all up?

Electronics Wizardy · February 22, 2019

If you can have the vm boot drive on a ssd, it will be much faster.

But the bigger hdds are normally a bit faster, but you probably won't notice.

vrod · February 22, 2019

Do not use RAID5, no server vendor today would recommend this... Only having those 4 drives will bring bad performance. I would at least recommend you to go the RAID6 way, or better - use mirroring if you don't need the space.

RAID5 will run super slow when rebuilding and since you have such big drives, the rebuilding process will also take a very long time, highly increasing the chance that a second drive will fail before the first one is even rebuilt. I've seen it...