There may be some recommendations for this via white paper somewhere, but I am trying to get a quick handle on reclaiming some SAN storage. We just attended the VI3 class and we built all the Windows servers with a 2 GB c-drive. Is this really an appropriate size for this kind of VM? Currently, our windows folks builds these with a 10GB c-drive...and when you have 40 of these in production, well the wasted SAN storage piles up.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks!
IMO 2 gb is too small. I build mine like your windows guys with 10gb C drives. You need the extra space for service packs and the like. windows also does not perform that well when there is less than 20% free space on a volume and I'm guessing with that small of a partition you might be very close to this.
Microsoft recommends a minimum of 3.0gb...
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/windowsserver/bb430827.aspx
I would never build a production server with 2GB system partition. We currently build our VMWARE servers with 8GB. You really don't want to run out of disk space on your C drive. Therefore give it some room to grow.
IMO 2 gb is too small. I build mine like your windows guys with 10gb C drives. You need the extra space for service packs and the like. windows also does not perform that well when there is less than 20% free space on a volume and I'm guessing with that small of a partition you might be very close to this.
Microsoft recommends a minimum of 3.0gb...
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/windowsserver/bb430827.aspx
A VM is really no different than a physical machine. The only difference is you can make the sizes exactly what you need.
If you need a 20gig C: drive, then you make a 20g drive. For performance, you can add drives, and put them on other luns.
But 2Gig may be the minimum size for boot partition, but I don't agree with this, I make all mine a big enough partition for everything, data, programs, etc.
So it's really up to you how big you want the VM to be.
I would start with something like 10g (with enough expansion room) and you can make it bigger later.
If you dont have 400gb availiable on your SAN, then you probably dont have enough drives in to give adequate performance over 40 VMs anyway,
Just my thoughts,
I have a similar number of VMs and performance is the big issue not space,
I have 14x 146gb drives in 1+0 running my VMs, and thats just about enough to give decent performance for 40 VMs,
Thanks to all for replying...you confirmed my thoughts on this. If we could have recouped some SAN storage that would have been nice.
Chad