DELL PE 2950, RAID and VMWare ESXi

_Kaiser_

Afternoon all,

I have a DELL PE2950 III server with 3x 1.5TB SATA disks that are configured as 2 RAID 0 arrays (necessary to get around the 2TB limits) and runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with some Hyper-V VMs

All works well....

What I want to do though is add a fourth 1.5TB disk and move to a RAID 5 setup. I know this will mean destroying the existing config and starting over - bit of a pain, but such is life! It's a test box, not a production server so downtime and what not isn't really an issue!

But I've also been considering putting a bare metal ESXi install in place as I keep hearing/reading how the performance is better than Hyper-V and I'd like to start getting familiar with it and Linux as well as I've traditionally been a Wintel guy, and nowadays potential employers want both (and usually something else with that as well!). As Hyper-V doesn't REALLY like Linux, I'd probably have to go the VMWare route anyway, right?

So, few questions:

1. How will ESXi handle my RAID setup? The way I had to work around the 2TB limitation last time was to create a 100GB Virtual Disk, install Windows, then use the rest of the space in a 2nd Virtual Disk through DELL Openmanage/Windows . Will I need to do the same with ESXi?

2. Is there really THAT much of a performance difference now since Hyper-V has matured a bit? The server itself has 2 3.0Ghz Dual Cores and 12GB RAM so it's not exactly slow as it is!

3. I'm not looking forward to backing it all up! Any recommendations here? I know there's various Hyper-V backup solutions and Hyper-V to VMware converters but any suggestions much appreciated!

4. Anything else I've forgotten? (probably!)

Cheers!

swampgas

Currently ESXi has a (2TB - 512B) upper limit, so you will have to configure your RAID controller to suit. Maybe two 1.99TB disks or as close as you can get?

sandleman1979

I have used both ESXi and Hyper-V and see little difference in performance when using either.

Your current setup is a full 2K8 R2 install? With the hyper-v role added? I would say the comments you have heard regarding performance would be that a full install of Windows 2k8 r2 has a bigger footprint on the physical hardware than ESXi.

There is a version of hyper-v that is basically Windows 2008 R2 core (command line, no GUI), this would be a much smaller footprint on the hardware as less resources are required to run the O/S. Only downside is that you need a separate machine to run the hyper-v management tool, similar to ESX. When not on a domain this can be a pain to setup permissions to access, whereas ESX has different security so will work better in a workgroup environment.

Converting machines can be good, but exporting the VM's using hyper-v console makes it easier to import on your target machine.

Issue with the free MS hypervisor is that you need separate windows licenses to run vm's.
Host 2008 standard = 1 virtual machine.
Host 2008 enterprise = 4 virtual machines.
Host 2008 Datacenter = unlimited

personally seeing as its test, keep it in hyper-v format unless you want to learn vmware...

gerryk

There should be no performance difference between Hyper-V and VMware ESXi. I can't think of a good reason why Hyper-V would have any issues with Linux either, if it does full virtualisation instead of paravirtualisation, which I'm pretty sure it does.

Go with what you feel most comfortable with, unless you want to learn VMWare.

swampgas

Going off topic a little, but anyway ...

Kaiser2000 wrote: »

[...]
What I want to do though is add a fourth 1.5TB disk and move to a RAID 5 setup.
[...]

Can't resist mentioning BAARF: http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

Horrible texty website, but the content is good.

So - maybe RAID 10 would be better?