Hi All,
I've got a 4x quad core Windows 2003 64bit server with 12 Gig RAM. It's got a dozen or so Virtual Machines set up although they are not all likely to be powered on a t the same time. Even so, I am getting frequent performance problems. Previous threads have lead me to believe it is to do with disk I/O bottlenecks and that this is due to the files used to create disk backups of the Virtual Machines' RAM being written to the same array as the virtual hard disks.
So, my question is now:
Currently I have 5 disks in total, am I better to keep the OS installed on a RAID 1 on two of the disks and tell the host to use this for VM RAM files as well, keeping the virtual disks on a separate RAID 5 array? Would this keep virtual machine disk and memory I/O on separate drives? Or would having the virtual machine RAM files on the same drive as the OS and paging file impact performance further.
Or, create one 5 disk RAID 5 array with separate partitions for the virtual disks and VM RAM files, spreading the I/O across all 5 spindles for each partition?
Are either of these solutions likely to improve performance?
Further, can anyone recommend the ideal number and set up of physical, local, drives for a host server that is going to be under a high load?
Many thanks,
Richard