[PLUG] help me design my server

["W. Chris Shank" <shankwc@acetechgroup.com>]

I need to spec-out and architect another VMWare and/or Xen VM host server. Currently I have one with 8 cores, 4GB ram, and 1.5TB HDD as 4 500GB SATA with hardware raid5. We are starting to hit the wall with this setup  running 5 VMs on it. Particularly, it seems the HDD I/O is the bottleneck. If one VM hits the disks hard it makes the others pretty much useless. 

So I have a budget to get another honking server. I'm confident the quad-core Xeons with the vm extensions are sufficient. I'll go ahead and bump the RAM to 16G too. The area I'm most concerned with is the disk I/O. I'm thinking that instead of one big RAID5, I'll pair smaller drives - so i'll have 4 sets of 2 250G SATA mirrors. Then direct it so that 2-3 VMs are on each raid.  Or should I go SCSI and keep one large RAID5?

So if you had the $$, what would you get and how would you configure it.

Thanks

-- 
W. Chris Shank
ACE Technology Group, LLC
www.myremoteITdept.com
(610) 640-4223

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