Hi
I need some input and experience regarding this scenario we are heading against during the first half this year.
We have today a file server 2008 R2 and it is a VM running on a Hyper-v host (2008 r2)It has 3 partitions one c: (system partition) d: (home folders) e: (department data.) 3GB RAM
Is it 60 users that use the file server. And the amount of data is 350GB on the d: drive and 1,1 TB on the e: drive. The vhd`s are set to dynamically expanded (was going to set them to fixed but after an initial try the time it took to
create them was extremly long so I was decided to go with dynamically). We are backing up the fileserver with DPM 2010 and from the agent installed on the hyper-v host once a day.
The hyper-v host is a HP DL380 G5, 32GB RAM and 2 sata disk in a raid 1 with the parent partition and one raid 6 build on 6*500GB sata disks where all the VM running. It is running 5 VMs on the partition that is on the
raid 6 disk array they are not any high load VMs except the fileserver that time to time write large amount of data to the disk.
Sometimes users complain that the performance of the file server is bad (that happens if several users copy data to the fileserver at the same time). I suspect that happen when data added to one of the vhd`s so it have to
expand and the take all the disk IO and impacts the whole server. (and the other vms on the host)
We are heeding against a fileserver consolidation after we have acquired a new company with a 60 users and 1 TB data. So after that we are 120 users and 2,45 TB fileserver data and the growth rate of data is about 40 % every year.
I understand that we are need hyper-v windows 2012 to be able to have vhd larger than 2 TB.
So the plan is to buy new hardware to install hyper-v 2012 and export the current fileserver vm to that host and convert the vhd`s to vhdx. Then move the data from the oter filservers into the filserver VM.
My 3 questions are:
First have anyone experience about file servers that are running as VM`s that have a medium workload, and have vhd that are in the size off several TB`s? Was it working well or any problems?(I know that MS best practices is to use iscsi pass throw from the VM to a physical disk area and not save the data on a VHD for large filservers)
How to size the underlying hardware? I have planned to have a hyper-v host with 6*3TB sata disks in a raid 10 to get better disk IO , then I hopefully can have some other vm`s running on the same disk array (and also parent partion).
Can dpm 2010 with an agent on a windows 2012 hyper host do hyper-v vm`s backup with single items restore as when running an dpm 2010 agent on a windows 2008r2 hyper-v host?
I hope I did not was writing to much now but if you read down to here, please reply if you have experience of this with large fileservers running as vm`s on vhd file(s)
Thanks
Jonas