Yes, your configuration is fine for playing with virtualization.
Your slow drives can easily become a bottleneck if you get too many virtual machines going - I would recommend a RAID 10 with your drives. You could also do three RAID 1's, giving separate "disks" to more virtual machines. You could also do a 2-disk RAID 1 and a 4-disk RAID 10. You could also do two separate RAID 5's, although the performance would be worse than RAID 10 ... but you CANNOT do a single RAID 5 - a single RAID 5 would give you 2.5TB of space, but you CANNOT boot the OS on a >2TB "disk" on the 1900.
The PERC 5/i can do RAID 0/1/5/10/50 ... not RAID 2.
Your system probably comes with a license for Server 2008, but if you have the ability to upgrade to a newer operating system, Hyper-V has come a LONG way since the first version in Server 2008.
Also note that Server 2008 had an OS option "without Hyper-V" ... so if you do not have the option to enable Hyper-V, that would be why ... make sure you have a version with Hyper-V if that is what you are planning.
thanks theflash1932 for the reply. pe 1900 is the only available resources I could get because of the limited resources. the plan is to have a comfortable/good foundation on managing hyper-v (vhd files and backup). I am trying to re-create what we have at work so I could test it here before going on live. really appreciate your knowledge sharing...thanks
hi theflash1932, just a follow up question...you've mentioned i could setup various RAID setup one is " You could also do a 2-disk RAID 1 and a 4-disk RAID 10". how can i achieve this type of settings..i've tried straight RAID setup but haven't tried using 2 RAID configuration.. can you give me a little guidance on this? thanks again..
When you are configuring RAID in the CTRL-R utility, select only two drives when creating a new virtual disk, then select RAID 1 (check Advanced and Initialize). You can then create the RAID 5 or 10 with the remaining 4 disks, or you can wait until after the OS is installed ... you can even do it from within the OS if you install OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).
theflash1932
9 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
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March 18th, 2014 10:00
Yes, your configuration is fine for playing with virtualization.
Your slow drives can easily become a bottleneck if you get too many virtual machines going - I would recommend a RAID 10 with your drives. You could also do three RAID 1's, giving separate "disks" to more virtual machines. You could also do a 2-disk RAID 1 and a 4-disk RAID 10. You could also do two separate RAID 5's, although the performance would be worse than RAID 10 ... but you CANNOT do a single RAID 5 - a single RAID 5 would give you 2.5TB of space, but you CANNOT boot the OS on a >2TB "disk" on the 1900.
The PERC 5/i can do RAID 0/1/5/10/50 ... not RAID 2.
Your system probably comes with a license for Server 2008, but if you have the ability to upgrade to a newer operating system, Hyper-V has come a LONG way since the first version in Server 2008.
Also note that Server 2008 had an OS option "without Hyper-V" ... so if you do not have the option to enable Hyper-V, that would be why ... make sure you have a version with Hyper-V if that is what you are planning.
iamynoht
23 Posts
0
March 18th, 2014 12:00
iamynoht
23 Posts
0
March 18th, 2014 13:00
theflash1932
9 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
0
March 18th, 2014 15:00
When you are configuring RAID in the CTRL-R utility, select only two drives when creating a new virtual disk, then select RAID 1 (check Advanced and Initialize). You can then create the RAID 5 or 10 with the remaining 4 disks, or you can wait until after the OS is installed ... you can even do it from within the OS if you install OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).