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I have a bulk of HDDs (10) and i want to build virtual lab on Hyper-V.I have gigabyte motherboard on Z77 chipset with 4 sata2 and 2 sata3 ports, and intel build-in RAID controller. Now I am looking for solution to reach maximum efficiency of HDD usage by VMs. What will be the best: 6 HDD RAID0 (on motherboard controller) and additional PCI-E RAID extension card with 4HDD RAID0 or 2-3 HDD RAID0 for system and 7-8 disks without RAID (each will be directly attached to particular VM) or some kind of other mixed environment? The point is to reach maximum quantity of VMs working simultaneously without freezes. What would you advise?

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  • How many virtual machines are looking to run exactly? You are going to reacht the memory and processing limits far before you reach any limits caused by hdds.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 12:26
  • 4 Servers and some workstations. I want to get maximum I/O operations efficiency. Currently my bottleneck is HDD. I wouldn't reach other resourses caps, because most of utilization falls on HDD system.
    – ko4evneg
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 13:42
  • OMG! I’m spindle bound
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 15:29

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OnBoard RAID is not meant for real Servers, if your Data is critical, use single disks per VM (if your VMs can make use of them) or PCIe RAID - and always create backups.

If your HDDs are not the same model, don't create a RAID. Equal latencies are critical in most RAID Systems.

If the HDDs are Desktop models and not meant for Servers/NAS boxes, watch out for Problems created by running more than one or two of them in a single Computer. The vibrations may disturb the cheap Desktop HDD mechanics.

You may reach the Memory Limit of your System, before you reach the HDD capacity Limit. But while running several VMs, the HDD Performance is critical and will get a bottleneck very easily.

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  • Yes i have already get bottleneck in my HDD system. Also my system is desktop, and for researching purposes, so i don't care about data protecting and i have large reserve of other resources. My goal is to get maximum performance of disk system for several VMs.
    – ko4evneg
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 13:48
  • For simplicity, I recommend one HDD per VM. As a side effect, moving VMs including its physical HDD resources to another Server.
    – Cellcon
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 15:55

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