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Personal test lab Hard drive suggestion
Personal test lab Hard drive suggestion
- Hello,
I have a question, I have very basic virtualization knowledge more or less based around ESX in production with SAN etc. By trade I'm an Exchange Admin so we dont do much with virtualization. I'm working on building one or two servers for my home so I can build a very extensive Exchange 2003/2007/2010 test lab. I want to have multiple AD sites and be able to test migrating from 2003 to 2007, then 2007 to 2010. Being their VM's I can build different labs etc. Also want to implement UM and host one or two windows clients. I might also house SQL so I can play around with DPM for backups.
My main concern is how powerful the hardware I should buy. I was thinking of getting an intel i7 core quad processor, and 12 gb of ram. I figured building two servers would not be a problem. My question though is simple this, how should I design the hard drive lay out for the VMs the physical and the logical presentation to Hyper-V server. I have a technet subscription so I have access to any software I need.
Any suggestion such as buying a dedicate raid cards etc. I'm looking more for performance but having a the ability to lose one hard drive is great. Considering the exchange will have very few mailboxes and not really doing any heavy work.
Any suggestion on what type of hardware I should look into would be great, I have some money to spare and really want to build a very extensive test lab.
Thanks- Changed TypeVincent HuMSFT, ModeratorWednesday, October 28, 2009 8:04 AM
All Replies
- You want as many spindles as possible. Seagate 2 TB drives are quite affordable now. Thanksgiving is next month, so you will probably see a lot of 1 - 2 TB drives on sale. My approach to my home test lab is nice and simple. No RAID at all, but lots of big drives.
if you are going to have three different vms running simultaneously, put each vm on a different drive. That way each vm has its own spindle. Copy your vhds to other drives. If you lose a drive, you can get the vhds from the other drives.
Do not use RAID 5 because it is a performance killer. Also remember that RAID on a desktop motherboard is fake RAID. It's functional, but it's not going to perform like SAS drives on a PERC. - As per John's request I thought I'd provide a couple of builds to his post:
1. For the sake of making your test lab consistent with true production environments, I would personally steer clear of setting up a lab on anything other than server class equipment. Though I realize Hyper-V, Exchange and SQL server are all supported on workstations you want equipment which will have gone through server-class QA to assure reliable, consistent behaviour (just my 2 cents).
On a side note: you will also find that refurb/second hand server-class equipment is often less expensive than desktop equipment. (My main Hyper-V VM server is a DELL 2950 2xQuad core with 32GB ram which ended up costing me less than a high end desktop computer and it came with its own hardware RAID controller).
2. If you require a significant amount of versatility when it comes to provisioning storage to your VMs, I would personally recommend leveraging ISCSI technology as a cheap and granular way to provision logical units of storage to your lab server, making sure however, that your storage server supports SCSI3-PR (if you plan on using Server 2008 clustering features); look into running a storage server running Starwind iSCSI, SanMelody or OPEN-E iSCSI.
On a side note, the storage server can even be provisioned in a virtual machine (it does not have to be a separate physical server)
One final comment: if you're planning to test exchange 2010, you will notice that Exchange Availablity management (and by extension storage management) is a complete paradigm shift... RAID-less storage configurations are the name of the game. you'll appreciate the flexibility a storage server will provide in order to address your requirements.- Edited byddg71 Tuesday, October 27, 2009 10:28 PMtypos
John and ddg71!
Thanks for your replies.
As for the test lab I did look into a 1950/2950 Dell. I need to do some more price comparisions and see if its worth it. In reality my test lab at home isnt there to stress test exchange servers the way they are in the real world with thousand of users on an MB role. Mine is more or less to test and setup things I normally dont get to mess with such as UM, Windows Mobile policies, and try things out and see what problems arise and play around with different edge/ht policies and CAS OWA settings. Areas that I dont get to do enough of and need to focus on more per say.
I like Pauls idea of having a bunch of large drives for the VMs and then have one drive to backup them all up just incase, but I think I'll put some more time into your number 2 and see other ideas of storage there are.
I'm on top of the Exchange 2010 raidless and DAG technology =)
Thanks again if anyone else has anything to add please reply, this weekend I'll look over the san melody etc.
