powerfool wrote: » Well, I think with your low number of clients, you should be fine. Your first hit will likely be RAM, as you only have 16GB, but disk I/O is probably a major concern as well. You have a NAS that doesn't likely have advanced features like cache, in memory parity calculation, or ILM... and it is also likely a low spindle count.
blargoe wrote: » I know "it depends" is kind of a lame answer, but it would be difficult to project exactly how many VM's you could get. I can tell you that Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server (which will be installed for SharePoint) are somewhat memory intensive and perform better when they can have memory available to use for caching. However, for a small environment, the requirement will not be as high. Memory or Disk will be your limiting factor. If you consolidate AD/DNS/DHCP/WINS, have a standalone SharePoint server, a single role Exchange server, and a couple of other servers (you mentioned WDS, web), there's a good chance you will reach or surpass the upper limit of acceptable performance. When you say "three clients", are you saying three users, or three customers, each of which have some number of users?
powerfool wrote: » Yep, as stated... "it depends" isn't what you are looking for... but it is the right answers. How are resources consumed currently and what are you looking to add? As far as vCPUs... a single Core i7 CPU has 4 cores and hyperthreading... presenting itself as 8 available processors. I would imagine that you could easily do 16 vCPUs as long as all 16 are hammered... but on the other end, folks have done MUCH higher densities. I have seen numerous reports of 10 vCPUs per core... and I am sure others have gone higher. But, it depends on the load. Honestly, I have to imagine that RAM is going to be your first hit, though. I had set of servers running dual Xeon 5500 CPUs with 32 gigs of RAM and CPU wasn't a factor even virtualizing tier-1 applications. RAM was our limiting factor, but we had virtualized everything that we wanted. Rather than adding servers to the cluster, we would have increased the RAM as necessary, first doubling to 64GB, and then upping to 96GB, before adding hosts. A dual Xeon 5500 setup is not exactly the same as a single Core i7, but you also have half as much RAM. Further, considering disk I/O, you have more to worry about than just the unit itself... you have the connectivity to worry about. How many interfaces... switching backplane capacity... port-channel configuration... jumbo frames... multipathing... etc. If this is a production workload, how are you backing up? Many utilize SAN snapshots and replication for these sorts of tasks... not something I would imagine is available in NAS-type storage... even that which is iSCSI-capable.
Overdash wrote: » Wow, Thanks for the advice! I wonder if I should buy another i7 and a dual slot Mobo with more memory banks. Then I could buy the exact same memory and double it to 32GB's! Bet I wouldn't be worried about performance then! As for infrastructure, I have jumbo frames enabled on my ioMega NAS and Cisco 3560 Switch. I have two network cards (+ 1 built in) installed on my ESXi 5 server making it highly available on the network, all LAN speed is 1Gbps. My NAS is RAID 1 so I have that level of redundancy, but I have not found a backup solution as of yet. I have a 1TB external drive that I want to use for backups once I find a good backup solution. Do you know of any? Thanks, (+REP)
powerfool wrote: » Well, I don't think that you should really have much of an issue with your CPU, I wouldn't go out and spend that money for a second CPU and a new motherboard (I am actually looking to get a dual Core i7 machine going for my home workstation, though, and I would run either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with VMware Workstation on top of it). Your issue isn't CPU... it is going to be RAM and/or disk I/O, if you even have any issue at all. You haven't explained the purpose of this setup (e.g. production workload, personal lab, personal business use, etc.) If you are to the point where resources are scarce, add more memory and disk I/O as required. You are at a performance disadvantage right now with the RAID 1 setup, but it does give necessary redundancy. You could purchase a second, third, etc NAS device as you can have more than one in your setup and load different VMs on different units. This would also give additional controller and NIC performance on the storage side. As far as backing up your data, again, it depends on your requirements. You could use DPM or another more traditional product to do backups of the guests, or you could just copy the VMDK files and such to other storage. Given your setup, I cannot imagine that you have vSphere and the VCB (remained, don't know what it is called now... was VMware Consolidated Backup). EDIT: If you reach the point where you need more CPU, I would just build an additional system... that way you have more operational capability... and if you one machine dies, at least you still have the other to service requests, even if it is at a slower pace.
Overdash wrote: » Hello thanks for the info on both posts (+REP) This is for my home domain and the services are used primarily by me. Do you suggest having 2 vCPU's and 4GB's of Memory for consolidating AD/DNS/DHCP server? I am the only real user in this domain so the load isn't bad at all. Thank you!
blargoe wrote: » If you're just using this for your home domain to play around with virtualization and/or playing with the technology that you're installing inside the VM's, what you have might be fine for labbing.
powerfool wrote: » I would concur. If you actually needing higher performance for a short duration, maybe setup something on Amazon's EC2 and S3... fairly cheap for short-term use.
Overdash wrote: » I have two network cards (+ 1 built in) installed on my ESXi 5 server making it highly available on the network, all LAN speed is 1Gbps.
