Hyper-V Guest Disk Configuration and SAN placement

In a nutshell, I have a test 2012 R2 cluster (2-node) attached by fibre to a SAN.  The SAN at present is configured with 2 volumes, one RAID 10 and the other RAID 5.

2 questions really.  Is it best practice for each guest to have 2 virtual hard disks, one for OS and the other for data.  If so, would it be appropriate to put the OS vhdx on the RAID 10 and the data on RAID 5?

I'm trying to get a general rule of thumb rather than cater for say specifics such as SQL server.  I'm really looking at file servers and the like initially.

Ian

January 30th, 2014 5:33am

Hi Ian, I have a similar setup in production, I have 5 CSV volumes, 2 of them are using SATA disks, and 3 are high performance SAS, based on an EMC VNX. I have classed these storage volume as Gold and Bronze.

we have some guests that are files servers, so the OS is on the fast disk, and the data is on the slower SATA disk.

I used SCVMM to Storage migrate and split the VHDX files up across CSV volumes.

I did see this in an article on Hyper-V and its a fully supported practice. I think it more down to requirements rather than best practice. and making use of any slower disk you have rather than wasting the high performance on applications that don't require it.

Hope that helps

Cheers

Mark

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January 30th, 2014 6:20am

Hi Ian, I have a similar setup in production, I have 5 CSV volumes, 2 of them are using SATA disks, and 3 are high performance SAS, based on an EMC VNX. I have classed these storage volume as Gold and Bronze.

we have some guests that are files servers, so the OS is on the fast disk, and the data is on the slower SATA disk.

I used SCVMM to Storage migrate and split the VHDX files up across CSV volumes.

I did see this in an article on Hyper-V and its a fully supported practice. I think it more down to requirements rather than best practice. and making use of any slower disk you have rather than wasting the high performance on applications that don't require it.

Hope that helps

Cheers

Mark

January 30th, 2014 2:15pm

Many thanks Mark
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February 5th, 2014 5:17am

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