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We are in the midst of a server upgrade. Currently, we have 2 servers. A WS2003 on some 9 years old hardware with 4 GB of RAM that holds the DC and Sage DB role. We want a new server that can split this current server into 2 VM. There is also another old physical server we might want to try virtualizing, it's a WS2008R2 running on 7 years old hardware with 32 GB of RAM and 2x E5630 (8C/16 total). This server is the Termianl/RDS Server.

I believe both servers are running on 7.2k SATA drives. Probably RAID1 for OS and RAID5 for DATA. We're planning to go with some recent hardware, 2x 8core CPU and about 64 GB of memory. What we still haven't decided on and needs some further information is hard drive.

What is the best hard drive type/raid configuration to handle all 3 servers VM? 10K SAS, 15K SAS, or SATA SSD? I heard RAID 10 for 10K and 15K SAS and RAID 5 for SSD. Do we RAID everything under the host as one big RAID or we split the host OS and the VM in different RAID configuration?

Additional information on current server resource usage:

WS2003 use about 40% of it's 4 GB of RAM and about 150 GB on storage. CPU usually hang around 30-50%. WS2008R2 hang around 50-80% of it's 32 GB of RAM and about 500 GB on storage. CPU usually hange around 30-50% as well. Usually about 15-25 people remote into this server at once. Typical users use about 300-500 MB of RAM with a few users using more. Software are MSOffice, PDF, internet browsing, printing, 1 or 2 business software, and the Sage software.

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firebolt126
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1 Answers1

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When it comes to spec the servers, namely their storage part, you will definetely need to get as much info about you current infrastructure as possible. The best method to collect such information is to run some special soft like DPACK from Dell. Despite the fact that you know what kind of applications you are going to move on to the new hardware and you know what exactly storage config you used to handle them, using some analysis tools is still a good idea. From what I've seen, you should be ok with 10K SAS drives in RAID 10 and dedicated RAID 1 array created with SSDs for OS. Or even SATA-DOM for it. Would it be a cluster, btw?

batistuta09
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