Re: Best practice on virtualizing SBS

OK, so if we stay within your expectations.

The current SBS hardware has 1GB RAM and your user count is low. It is this
hardware that will be hosting both SBS and your TS but you are prepared to
throw more RAM in the machine. Please confirm.

Hopefully, in 2009 new hardware will be purchased. This is pretty well ideal
as you have a fully fine SBS2003 and by then the 'kinks' will be ironed out
of SBS2008 and Hyper-V. (are you sure you can't go to 4GB (3.5 maybe) on the
current HW? it would be good. Depends on mobo/bios whether all such would be
available though.)

I'd throw the extra RAM in the current SBS and use it as host for TS in a
VM. You will be stealing RAM to run the VM but also have more RAM for the
SBS. In 2009 I would look at purchasing the new box with 'Server Core +
Hyper-V' only, doing the move to a VM at that time, 1st by moving the
existing SBS2003 to virtual then possibly moving to SBS2008.


"MijakiDK" <MijakiDK@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:DE8D8FF1-A942-4A09-A3FD-380F594EAC44@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Wow that was a lot, nothing short and sweet from you Gumby :-)

The x64 issue has to be dealt with on a later stage as the existing server
is x32 and budget does not allow for the purchase of new hardware before
2009
- I hope ;-)

We are a tiny company with 6 active users - 3 working outside the office
on
PDA (sales) and dsl in the evening for mail. So the performance we have
today
is very fine and bottlenecks are not on the server side - I expect a
virtual
SBS will not be slower.

At the moment my SBS is running on 1GB of ram, the host box will get 3GB
and
I expect to use 2GB for the SBS and dual nic of course.

And finally, getting past the hardship of updating hardware using a
virtual
SBS is a very promissing concept.

Currently I'm having user data etc. on the D-drive of my SBS and AFAI
understood you would keep the D-drive in the VHD file?

"SuperGumby [SBS MVP]" wrote:

I can't go as far as saying this is anything formal 'best practice'
but...

Host box should be x64. This is even more necessary as we move forward
where
the host can be expected to be best implemented as Windows Server 2008
(CORE
only) with Hyper-V, I believe this will be x64 with VT only. Even staying
at
a W2k3+VS200x you can _expect_ x64 on the host to offer best performance.
OK, VMWare Server will do x64 guest on x32, as long as it fully supports
VT
(CPU, mobo, BIOS), but the x64 host can be _expected_ to handle it
better.

I'm starting to think that for a decent implementation you also want dual
or
better 'teamed' NICs on the host. There is some impact to network
performance in the VM imposed by the mere fact of virtualisation,
compensating for this by providing the best possible network performance
on
the host sounds like a reasonable idea.

It is suggested that having multiple RAID arrays, dedicating arrays to
the
VM and providing the arrays to the VM as 'direct' drives will provide
best
performance. I do not disagree with this in this aspect but prefer that
only
the VM be able to access the content of it's drives, I therefore
sacrifice
some performance by running 'drives as files'.

AV on the host should be told to exclude the folder containing and VHD's
from scanning and if you do provide 'direct drives' to the VM I'd also
exclude those drives from scanning by the host.

I would disable Shadow Copies on the host partitions holding VHD's. SC's
of
the VHD's will not be maintained anyway, due to size, but I don't want
any
impact from the host 'inspecting' the partition to see if it can SC
anything.

"MijakiDK" <MijakiDK@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:FBC63E68-4EE5-43C3-B62A-7A700C2F937D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hey there,

Any input on this?

Do I take an ordinary W2K3 server an load my SBS as a virtual on that
or?

Do I "loose" my D-drive for data and map to the data in the future when
I
have done the virtualisation? Thus only make a virtual server of my SBS
C-drive?

I haven't got a SAN or anything - I'm simply trying to get my 2 server
system down to 1 physical box.

My other server is a W2K3 for TS.

Happy new year

Kim





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