- #BEST VIRTUAL MACHINE SOFTWARE FOR SERVERS FREE#
- #BEST VIRTUAL MACHINE SOFTWARE FOR SERVERS WINDOWS#
#BEST VIRTUAL MACHINE SOFTWARE FOR SERVERS FREE#
Of course this can end up being wasteful space-wise: you may end up with a lot of free space on one array but don't want to use it as there are already I/O intensive VMs in constant use on that array for instance (though in this case if you had a single array the VM you would put in that space would be competing for IO access like that anyway), or you may end up with 25Gb free on each array but need 50Gb for a new VM. Two VMs on different RAID1 arrays can be merrily thrashing their virtual disks without much affecting the responsiveness of each other or a VM on the third array. This way you can spread the VMs over different spindles so they will compete with each other far less for IO bandwidth. There is another option though: three separate RAID1 arrays (or possibly two RAID10 arrays if your controller supports 3-drive RAID10 (RAID1E as some controllers call it)). Or if space is not at all an issue and redundancy and rebuild-on-drive-failure time is a big concern, then you might even consider two three-drive RAID1s nested in RAID0 (but that is overkill for most purposes, though it would allow two drives on each R1 leg to fail at the same time while keeping the array alive). Ignoring that (or assuming the six drives doesn't count spares you might have easy access to) I would suggest RAID10 (three RAID1s nested in a RAID0) over RAID5 for the performance reasons you mention. If this is a mission critical system, then you need to make sure that you've got some spare drives locally should one fail (unless you have some support contract on the hardware that says you can get replacements same-day, but even then a local spare is worth having). If you're concerned about space you can use Thin-Provisioned disks and/or buy the 600GB 10k disks instead of the 146GB 15k disks, the performance drop-off won't be too bad but you'll have a lot more space - you could always buy 4 x 600 today and add 2 more later if you needed the extra spindles?
If I were you I wouldn't 'fall at the final hurdle' - I'd use R10 knowing you'd done the right thing. You've done a good job of picking your components already and you'll certainly see a huge improvement in performance. Also doing any of this in software further reduces performance during rebuild as all data is going over the same bus, including 'in life' traffic. R6 changes this a little but usually brings with it often much slower write performance. 2/3TB 7.2k SATAs) as arrays of these disks can take literally days to rebuild following a disk replacement or addition - meaning the entire array would be lost if a second disk failed during this rebuild window.įor many on this site this risk is too high, myself included. The argument for R10 over R5 is strongest when dealing with the larger, slower disks some buy because their GB/$£€ is better (i.e. R5/R6 but they boil down to "exposure during rebuild". There's lots of similar questions/arguments on this site regarding R10 vs. Do we need RAID 10 or would RAID 5 also be a good choice for us? But it comes at a cost of less drive space. Should we go for having the the 6x146GB SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration or a RAID 5 configuration? RAID 10 seems to offer better write performance and lower risk of a RAID failure. But we are not sure about the RAID level for the new rig. We believe the new server is going to make our VMs perform a lot better than our existing setup (2xIntel XEON, 16GB RAM, 2x500 GB SATA in RAID 1). These VMs will only be started when needed. The load on this server is going to be quite insignificant.īeyond that we will need to build several SharePoint farms for testing purposes. SharePoint 2010 Server for hosting our public Web site and our internal Intranet for a few people.
#BEST VIRTUAL MACHINE SOFTWARE FOR SERVERS WINDOWS#
For a start, we plan to build and start the following VMs - all with Windows Server 2008 R2 圆4: We will be using the free VMware ESXi for virtualization.
We do a lot of software development for Microsoft SharePoint and need the rig to run several virtual machines for development and test purposes. I have just ordered a new rig for my business.