New Server Hardware

[StuFrankish]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice from the community about what server hardware I should have/get to run a number of virtual machines.

 

My current server uses:

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. H81M-S2H

16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 790MHz (11-11-11-28)

Intel Core i5 4460 @ 3.20GHz Haswell

120GB SSD for Windows Server 2012 R2 (std. edition)

2x 3TB WD Reds for file share and backup

 

At the moment I the server itself runs my Plex, Media share and hosts Hyper-V.

The only virtual machine I have running also runs on Server 2012 R2, but only has IIS and SQL server installed for my web site.

 

I'm running into an issue where I think the hardware is either limiting me or letting me down, but I can't seem to spin up more than one VM at a time, or last VM to boot halts, and the Hyper-V management service locks up forcing me to hard reset the whole box as then everything cascades to a halt.

 

Was my hardware choice OK for use as a 24/7 server? Did I make a stupid mistake somewhere cheaping out or should I have been OK with whats there?

 

I'd like to use hardware that's more robust, but I can't afford to buy a complete rack server.

I have a rack but it's 6U and will only support short cases, so it's currently sitting unused.

 

I also want to have options for additional storage, currently the board I have limits me to 4 SATA disks, including the OS disk,

 

[Himommies]

Xeon proccesors would be better suited to server use

[tt2468]

1 hour ago, Saldash said:

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice from the community about what server hardware I should have/get to run a number of virtual machines.

 

My current server uses:

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. H81M-S2H

16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 790MHz (11-11-11-28)

Intel Core i5 4460 @ 3.20GHz Haswell

120GB SSD for Windows Server 2012 R2 (std. edition)

2x 3TB WD Reds for file share and backup

 

At the moment I the server itself runs my Plex, Media share and hosts Hyper-V.

The only virtual machine I have running also runs on Server 2012 R2, but only has IIS and SQL server installed for my web site.

 

I'm running into an issue where I think the hardware is either limiting me or letting me down, but I can't seem to spin up more than one VM at a time, or last VM to boot halts, and the Hyper-V management service locks up forcing me to hard reset the whole box as then everything cascades to a halt.

 

Was my hardware choice OK for use as a 24/7 server? Did I make a stupid mistake somewhere cheaping out or should I have been OK with whats there?

 

I'd like to use hardware that's more robust, but I can't afford to buy a complete rack server.

I have a rack but it's 6U and will only support short cases, so it's currently sitting unused.

 

I also want to have options for additional storage, currently the board I have limits me to 4 SATA disks, including the OS disk,

 

I would say get a used server from ebay. They have the best performance per dollar, and are actual, reliable, servers. The r610 has 6 2.5" sas bays, the r710 has 8 2.5" sas bays, the r410 has 4 3.5" sas bays, and the r210 has 2 3.5" sata bays. 

[leadeater]

This computer is running Hyper-V only, your not also using it as a workstation? If so the general rule is 4 vCPUs to 1 pCPU which means you can have up to 16 vCPUs total across all VMs you run, but no more than 4 for any single VM.

 

I suspect the problem is storage performance. For your Hyper-V VMs where are they stored? If you are running them off the two WD Reds then that is not enough, those disks are not suited/designed to host virtual machines. If you have enough of them they will work ok but those are NAS disks for a single OS serving files to multiple clients, it may seem like multiple VMs vs multiple SMB clients is similar but it's not.

 

To confirm if this is the issue open up resource monitor and go to the disk tab, then expan the bottom panel 'Storage'. Once you have this open and monitoring start your VMs, if everything hangs and the disk usage is solid 100% and disk queue is really high (constantly over 30) then this is the problem.

 

Since you are using Hyper-V on Server 2012 R2 your best bet is to find two really cheap SSDs and configure Windows Storage Spaces with Auto Tiering. Use a two-way mirror configuration for both to have resiliency. What this will do is cache frequently used data to the SSDs, you won't need much so a 120GB or smaller will do the job.

[Mark77]

Your hardware, although certainly not what I'd buy for the purpose, probably isn't an issue.  Something else is.  I've run multiple VMs on far less hardware.  So buying a new motherboard, ie: a 'server' motherboard isn't likely to solve the problem. 

 

And yes, +1 on the I/O.  Hard drives, especially slow WD Reds, are bad enough to use on normal PCs, but in virtualization environments, they're even worse.