Hyper-V 2008 on Dell T410 without RAID!!

Hi, Please don't shoot me down here, our company are relocating to a small office with no room for our 3 existing Dell rack servers and cabinet. Budget is tight as a ...well its tight, about £1100 so I'm trying to squeeze a dell PowerEdge T410 and then stick Hyper_v 2008 hypervisor on there to allow me 3 guest VMs.

Guest VM 1 will be Server 2003 32 bit running AD & Exchange 2003 [I know!]. Only 11GB Exchange database and 40 AD users.

Guest VM 2 is Server 2000 running BES & Sage, again not a big resource, only 22 Blackbverry & 1 Sage user.

Guest VM 3 is Server 2003 appliance center as a NAS device, total of 300GB files currently.

My budget server will be:

Processor: Intel Xeon E5504, 4C, 2.00Ghz, 4M Cache, 4.80GT/s, 80W TDP, Memory runs at 800MHz

Memory: 8GB Memory for 1 CPU, DDR3, 1333MHz (4x2GB Dual Ranked RDIMMs)

Raid Connectivity: C4 Cabled - RAID 1 with PERC H200, 2 SAS/SATA Cabled HDDs

1st Hard Drive - Multiquantity: 2 x 500GB, SATA, 3.5-in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Cabled))

2 x NICs & 2 x Power Supply

My queries:

1 - is RAID 1 OK for my set-up, would RAID 5 be more suited to virtualisation.

2 - I will be backing up all VMs to an external USB drive for offsite backup, this I guess will give me a quick restore should any VM suffer software issues / wont boot etc

3 - One of my current servers is RAID5, am I OK to go p2v on this even though the host wont be RAID5?. Its also 32 bit but I am sure that will run as VM on 64 bit VM host?

4 - Anyone know of more suitable hardware than the Dell for this purpose, needs to run quite as will be in main office?

Many thanks.

From serverfault gary

• 1. R1 would be BETTER than R5 in this situation.
  2. Sounds fine.
  3. Yes, no problem.
  4. I'm not a 'value'-guy I'm afraid but I'm sure someone will step in (most likely suggesting Supermicro who appear to be the current darlings of the VFM guys).

  One thing I did notice was that you're looking to buy 4 memory modules for this box - DON'T - that's a triple-channel CPU you're buying - if possible go for 3 x 4GB for a total of 12GB, it'll be much faster. Also if you can afford it go for the E5520 or E5620 - these chips provide hyperthreading which could double your system power for around an extra 10% of cost.

  Evan Anderson : +1 for the triple-channel memory recommendation. My R710's have 24GB and 48GB for just this reason.

  Chopper3 : wait until you see the sandy bridge EX xeon's memory specs and requirements - correct memory layout will be a degree level subject :)

  Kara Marfia : re: #3 - depending on the servers you're virtualizing, be sure to budget yourself some extra time for this process. The older the server, the more hassle I ran into (particularly some of those win2k boxes).

  gary : Hi thanks for answers, some more thinking to do for me I think! Before taking the plunge I installed VMware onto my laptop and created a Windows 2003 server VM to ensure I could actually achieve what is needed. Ran into a problem immediately, the original server is OEM so its asking me to activate again on the VM... For testing purposes am I able to activate by phone, so I can test the solution works? Thanks.

  Chopper3 : I'm not a Windows person sorry - perhaps that's the kind of question that you could search for on here and if it hasn't been asked before would make an interesting separate question?

  gary : Thanks Chopper3, I will post as seperate question, this must have been a problem for many others before now.
  From Chopper3

• Your budget is the main problem. My main office server is a non-server micro atx based system (AMD, 4 cores, 10gb RAM), but I am using a hardware Raid (Adaptec 3805) with a Raid 10 for the OS / Hyper-V stuff and a Radi 5 for the files... 8 hard discs in a little cube (all 2.5" - you can get them into two 5.25" slots, even in a SAS backplane).

  My main problem ould be disc IO - even with my setup I regularly run into heavy IO issues when all the operating systems are doing things like updates. I would love to go to 16gb memory (which my mobo supports) but my RAID controller blocks it (does not boot with more than 10gb hooked in - damn).

  From TomTom