Hyper-V Performance

[dross_199]

Afternoon all,

 

Got a nice DL150 g6 last week to use as my main VM server, im having a few issues running multiple VM's from a 3tb WD red drive. Has anyone else had any other issues with these drives in this use case. I think i will probable have to get a 7200rpm drive for this but on the off change anyone has any other recommendations it would be much appreciated. I have been thinking of using a 3tb Toshiba but i have read that they arent to reliable. please bare in mind that i am not made of money and cannot effort to get a enterprise grade drive.

 

cheers all  

[KuJoe]

Why are you only using 1 drive? Get a handful of drives and run them in RAID10, that will fix your problem. I can barely run 2 VMs on a single 7200 RPM drive without noticing how sluggish they are but I can run 500+ VMs on 6x SATA drives in RAID10 no problem.

[harry4742]

or simply go with SSDs, they were made for that stuff

[dross_199]

should of said in the original post that i currently have 2x 3tb red drive and a 250gb ssd for the boot, the rack server that i have got can only support 4 drive total. Other note i haven't done any raid whats so ever as i am needing the full capacity both the 3 tb drives. 

[dross_199]

9 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Why are you only using 1 drive? Get a handful of drives and run them in RAID10, that will fix your problem. I can barely run 2 VMs on a single 7200 RPM drive without noticing how sluggish they are but I can run 500+ VMs on 6x SATA drives in RAID10 no problem.

should of said in the original post that i currently have 2x 3tb red drive and a 250gb ssd for the boot, the rack server that i have got can only support 4 drive total. Other note i haven't done any raid whats so ever as i am needing the full capacity both the 3 tb drives. 

 

[dross_199]

5 minutes ago, harry4742 said:

or simply go with SSDs, they were made for that stuff

was debating whether to do this as i would prefer to have more storage for the cost of the ssd  

[KuJoe]

Can you provide more details about your setup? It's hard for us to make a suggestion without knowing anything about what you're doing or why you're doing it. Thanks.

[harry4742]

1 minute ago, dross_199 said:

should of said in the original post that i currently have 2x 3tb red drive and a 250gb ssd for the boot, the rack server that i have got can only support 4 drive total. Other note i haven't done any raid whats so ever as i am needing the full capacity both the 3 tb drives. 

 

The problem is the IO of the HDDs a good HDD has something around 100 IOPS an SSD has easily 50000 IOPS (the slow ones) try to split your VMs in Boot and Data drives, data goes to HDD OS to SSD

[harry4742]

1 minute ago, dross_199 said:

was debating whether to do this as i would prefer to have more storage for the cost of the ssd  

There are 16 TB SSDs....

Get capacity OR get performance

Or more Drveslots

 

[KuJoe]

1 minute ago, harry4742 said:

There are 16 TB SSDs....

Get capacity OR get performance

Or more Drveslots

 

Link?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, harry4742 said:

The problem is the IO of the HDDs a good HDD has something around 100 IOPS an SSD has easily 50000 IOPS (the slow ones) try to split your VMs in Boot and Data drives, data goes to HDD OS to SSD

I have had 20+ vms running on a single raid 5 of 4 hdds. You should be albe to run them just fine. 

 

Are you getting a error.

[harry4742]

2 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Link?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its-pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k

[KuJoe]

1 minute ago, harry4742 said:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its-pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k

Oh, I thought you meant they were for sale and you could buy them now. My bad.

[dross_199]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

Can you provide more details about your setup? It's hard for us to make a suggestion without knowing anything about what you're doing or why you're doing it. Thanks.

Apologies im doing this all work  

 

HP Proliant DL 150 G6 1u

CPU: 2x E5645 Hex core 

Memory: 48gb 1333ghz ECC

Storage:

1x 250gb SSD - boot

2x 3tb WD red - Data storage

 

Currently needing to use the server for Plex and Hyper-v lab environment for my accreditation and just to play with new technology's.

[KuJoe]

Just now, dross_199 said:

Apologies im doing this all work  

 

HP Proliant DL 150 G6 1u

CPU: 2x E5645 Hex core 

Memory: 48gb 1333ghz ECC

Storage:

1x 250gb SSD - boot

2x 3tb WD red - Data storage

 

Currently needing to use the server for Plex and Hyper-v lab environment for my accreditation and just to play with new technology's.

How are the drives being used? What VMs are on what drives? If it's just for unimportant data why not RAID0 the two 3TB drives for better performance?

[harry4742]

3 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Oh, I thought you meant they were for sale and you could buy them now. My bad.

wow already discontinued

 

[harry4742]

3 minutes ago, dross_199 said:

Apologies im doing this all work  

 

HP Proliant DL 150 G6 1u

CPU: 2x E5645 Hex core 

Memory: 48gb 1333ghz ECC

Storage:

1x 250gb SSD - boot

2x 3tb WD red - Data storage

 

Currently needing to use the server for Plex and Hyper-v lab environment for my accreditation and just to play with new technology's.

didn't you say that it can take 4 drives?

with storage pools you can create a automtically tiering storage 

add a 500 GB SSD and let it auto tier

the ssd should then handle vm stuff automatically

[dross_199]

2 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

How are the drives being used? What VMs are on what drives? If it's just for unimportant data why not RAID0 the two 3TB drives for better performance?

Drive1: Used for storing  all of my family shared data that comes to 500gb total and currently has the Hyper-v VHDX file and config

 

Drive2 : just my TV&Films directory that is currently 2TB in size

[dross_199]

6 minutes ago, harry4742 said:

didn't you say that it can take 4 drives?

with storage pools you can create a automtically tiering storage 

add a 500 GB SSD and let it auto tier

the ssd should then handle vm stuff automatically

Ive looked into this but i was a but hesitant on loosing all of that usable storage. As the drives took a chunk of my total budget. From what i can see on the motherboard i can only have 4 drives total, unless i get a new raid card that i can use for the ssd. But still not 100% sure.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, harry4742 said:

didn't you say that it can take 4 drives?

with storage pools you can create a automtically tiering storage 

add a 500 GB SSD and let it auto tier

the ssd should then handle vm stuff automatically

 

1 hour ago, dross_199 said:

Ive looked into this but i was a but hesitant on loosing all of that usable storage. As the drives took a chunk of my total budget. From what i can see on the motherboard i can only have 4 drives total, unless i get a new raid card that i can use for the ssd. But still not 100% sure.

You'll need a minimum of 3 SSD's to do teir storage spaces, 1 for the OS and 2 for storage spaces in a 2 way mirror configuration. You can easily get IBM M1015/LSI 9211 SASHBA off ebay for quite reasonable prices and SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cables are also required.

 

I have used storage spaces with teiring in both Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 and it works very well, better in Server 2016 of course being newer. The setup cost for the bare minimum configuration is expensive though, 3x SDD and 2x HDD.

[harry4742]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

 

You'll need a minimum of 3 SSD's to do teir storage spaces, 1 for the OS and 2 for storage spaces in a 2 way mirror configuration. You can easily get IBM M1015/LSI 9211 SASHBA off ebay for quite reasonable prices and SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cables are also required.

 

I have used storage spaces with teiring in both Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 and it works very well, better in Server 2016 of course being newer. The setup cost for the bare minimum configuration is expensive though, 3x SDD and 2x HDD.

I am talking about storage pools and not storage spaces

[leadeater]

Just now, harry4742 said:

I am talking about storage pools and not storage spaces

Storage Pools and Storage Spaces in Windows is the same thing, Storage Spaces is the actual name of the technology to create storage pools.

[harry4742]

then i am doing it with 2 1TB HDDs and a 64 GB SSD, it works

[leadeater]

Just now, harry4742 said:

then i am doing it with 2 1TB HDDs and a 64 GB SSD, it works

Are the two HDDs in a 2 way mirror or in simple configuration, SSDs used to cache HDDs have to be in a resiliency configuration if the HDDs are in any resiliency configuration. It's been a little while since I've used Server 2012 R2 but 2016 will 100% not allow you to create a configuration with the cache tier in simple and the HDDs in mirror/parity.

 

I have 5 servers using Storage Spaces so I have spent a lot of time using it and there are a few things you have to do to ensure optimal performance e.g. manually setting the storage pool logical block size and forcing power protected to true.

http://jeffgraves.me/2014/06/03/ssds-on-storage-spaces-are-killing-your-vms-performance/

[dross_199]

47 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

You'll need a minimum of 3 SSD's to do teir storage spaces, 1 for the OS and 2 for storage spaces in a 2 way mirror configuration. You can easily get IBM M1015/LSI 9211 SASHBA off ebay for quite reasonable prices and SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cables are also required.

 

I have used storage spaces with teiring in both Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 and it works very well, better in Server 2016 of course being newer. The setup cost for the bare minimum configuration is expensive though, 3x SDD and 2x HDD.

so with is my config would be 3x500gb ssd and 2x3tb wd reds ? so usable storage would be 500gb -os and 3.5tb with 2x ssd in mirror and 2x 3tb in mirror ? This might be quite tight with my 1u case.