@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Spend the $15 to get a USB drive to be the install target for Hyper-V, and then boot the server from that USB drive each time. Like others have said, keep the SSD to give yourself some fast storage to play with and not to run a hypervisor.

If you're only playing with a single SSD you could even leverage it and use the free version of Starwind to accelerate the VMs running on the spinning disk datastore (I think). Someone else may want to verify this specific point.

I do have plenty of extra USB drives. I was considering that also but I don't know if I want a USB drive sticking out of the back of my server.

You can get a really slim USB stick online for cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Low-Profile-Drive-SDCZ33-008G-B35/dp/B005FYNSUA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1506622655&sr=8-3&keywords=small+usb+drive

oh man.. yes, that would be a lot better. Maybe I will just install Hyper-v on my current USB just for S&G. I've never installed Hyper-v before so I don't mind having to do it again on a different, smaller USB later..

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Did you say what size the SAS drives are (2.5" or 3.5")? I missed it if so. I'm curious if the SSDs will fit in the Dell drive cage chassis properly if they are 2.5" and the SAS disks you have are 3.5".

SAS drives are 2.5" and I have some caddie spacers that let me use 2.5 in 3.5 caddie. I do already have one 2.5" consumer SSD running in this server, waiting for me to finish installing Hyper-V as we speak.

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Spend the $15 to get a USB drive to be the install target for Hyper-V, and then boot the server from that USB drive each time. Like others have said, keep the SSD to give yourself some fast storage to play with and not to run a hypervisor.

If you're only playing with a single SSD you could even leverage it and use the free version of Starwind to accelerate the VMs running on the spinning disk datastore (I think). Someone else may want to verify this specific point.

I do have plenty of extra USB drives. I was considering that also but I don't know if I want a USB drive sticking out of the back of my server.

@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

4x 6TB drives

That's 12TB usable in RAID 10. Not sure why that wouldn't be a good option.

Because I was planning to not use them for this.. but now I'm considering changing my mind.

Oh I see. What were you planning on using them for? Could you roll that into this via a VM and application?

They are in a different server now, holding some files.

@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

4x 6TB drives

That's 12TB usable in RAID 10. Not sure why that wouldn't be a good option.

Because I was planning to not use them for this.. but now I'm considering changing my mind.

@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

If you go with SSD's you'd use OBR5.

If you went with 15K drives you'd use OBR6.

Why?

OBR5 is safe (enough) because URE's don't happen with SSD's. SSD's just die. So you'd replace it as soon as it died. They also rebuild way faster.

OBR6 with 15K drives because you have a lot of them, but they are smaller capacity (300GB). So you'd get enough performance and the most usable space from the array.

oooh. I didn't know that about URE's and SSD's

@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

If you go with SSD's you'd use OBR5.

If you went with 15K drives you'd use OBR6.

Why?

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

you might as well go with your original ideal of putting in as many SSD or 15K drives as you can get caddies for, making a smaller array of those, and using that, too. Can you get four and four?

Are you saying use 4+ SSD or 15k drives in RIAD10 and making the smaller array and using it for only Hyper-V - in addition to another RAID10 array for storage?

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dashrender said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Maybe I should see if I can install Hyper-V on an SD card.. I have an iDRAC with the card slot

No, don't do that. MS used to semi-support that long ago. Now they do not at all.

k then.. I guess I'll just leave the single SSD in and finish installing it to that. I started the install process to one Intel SSD then paused to come post my questions here.

FYI, this is a complete waste of a SSD drive. More IOPs wasted on something that can't/won't use it.

Why are you setting up Hyper-V today when you don't have drives to store the VM's on? Why not wait until you buy those 6+ large HDDs and make a OBR10 and install Hyper-V on there.

It doesn't need to be 8 drives, 6 is fine if that gives you the storage you need. Hyper-V install itself is pretty small, I'm guessing 20 GB or less.

Hmm... well, I do have 4x 6TB 7200RPM SATA drives I was planning to use for something else, but I guess I could just use them for this.

Maybe you should list all of the drives that you have to work with, and we can guide from there.

haha.. sorry.. ok so I have 4x 6TB drives and then I have a ton of 2.5" 300GB 10k and 15k SAS drives, but the problem here is I only have a couple of 2.5" to 3.5" caddie spacers.. I'd have to really dig to find more.

So if I just wanted to use the 4x 6TB drives, would I create a RAID array and then create two separate volumes on that, one for Hyper-V and one for storage, or just have one volume and install Hyper-V to that?

@dashrender said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Maybe I should see if I can install Hyper-V on an SD card.. I have an iDRAC with the card slot

No, don't do that. MS used to semi-support that long ago. Now they do not at all.

k then.. I guess I'll just leave the single SSD in and finish installing it to that. I started the install process to one Intel SSD then paused to come post my questions here.

FYI, this is a complete waste of a SSD drive. More IOPs wasted on something that can't/won't use it.

Why are you setting up Hyper-V today when you don't have drives to store the VM's on? Why not wait until you buy those 6+ large HDDs and make a OBR10 and install Hyper-V on there.

It doesn't need to be 8 drives, 6 is fine if that gives you the storage you need. Hyper-V install itself is pretty small, I'm guessing 20 GB or less.

Hmm... well, I do have 4x 6TB 7200RPM SATA drives I was planning to use for something else, but I guess I could just use them for this.

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Maybe I should see if I can install Hyper-V on an SD card.. I have an iDRAC with the card slot

No, don't do that. MS used to semi-support that long ago. Now they do not at all.

k then.. I guess I'll just leave the single SSD in and finish installing it to that. I started the install process to one Intel SSD then paused to come post my questions here.

Maybe I should see if I can install Hyper-V on an SD card.. I have an iDRAC with the card slot

@aaronstuder said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Dell will often reject consumer drives. Or any non-Dell drives.

What? What do you mean reject them? They will complain, but the drives work just fine... At least everything I have tested.

Yeah I'm using a non-Dell SSD right now in this server and it's working fine.

@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Installing the role moves the previous bare metal installation to be above the hypervisor.

The windows server installation needs to be licensed and activated.

It binds the 2 VM's you can have to that hardware.

The part you are mixing up is that Installing the role on Windows (10 or Server 2016 or any Windows environment) is that it is taking that environment and transforming it into the Dom0.

The control domain.

So all of the limitations of that control domain are then brought into the hypervisor. Where as installing Hyper-V creates a completely free to use control domain at $0 cost to you, and without any of the restrictions from a Microsoft environment.

oh cool. I didn't know that.. I really need to do some learning..

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.

Couple terminology pieces...

Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.

They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.

Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.

Right, Hyper-V is not an OS. Avoid that term.

Also there is more confusion about the product. Let's break this down.

Hyper-V is the Type 1 hypervisor, that means it is always bare metal. Never use the term "bare metal" with Hyper-V, because that is implied. It's redundant, but implies that you are confused and think that there is another option.

I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't talking about the Hyper-V role in Windows.

Right, but that doesn't imply that in any way. But calling your install Windows Hyper-V, instead of Hyper-V, implied that you were doing the role. Because the role is every bit as bare metal as the normal install, saying bare metal doesn't mean anything at all. But including the word Windows would mean a lot.

How is installing the Windows Hyper-V role on a Windows Server installation the same as installing the hypervisor? I thought that installing the role was worse than just installing the hypervisor since it's kinda sitting on top of the Windows Server OS and adds overhead or something.

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

So wait, are slots 0 and 1 the 2.5" bays?

This R510 has 8x 3.5" drive bays. My SAS drives are 2.5" but I have the Dell caddie spacer things..

But you can't scrounge up eight drives, only six, that match?

I have a lot of low capacity drives (like 300GB drives) but it's a mix of 10k and 15k and then some are dead and some aren't.

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.

Couple terminology pieces...

Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.

They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.

Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.

Right, Hyper-V is not an OS. Avoid that term.

Also there is more confusion about the product. Let's break this down.

Hyper-V is the Type 1 hypervisor, that means it is always bare metal. Never use the term "bare metal" with Hyper-V, because that is implied. It's redundant, but implies that you are confused and think that there is another option.

I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't talking about the Hyper-V role in Windows.

Hyper-V is Hyper-V, not Windows. There is no such thing as Windows Hyper-V. There is Windows the OS, and Hyper-V the HV. The two are distinct, separate entities that never merge together. So you have to figure out if you mean you are installing Windows or installing Hyper-V.

I meant "Microsoft" instead of "Windows"

Hyper-V has a native installer ISO or it can be installed through a "helper" inside Windows. Those are purely deployment methods and not related to anything else here.

?

@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.

Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.

That's kinda what I thought, but I wasn't 100% sure..

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

So wait, are slots 0 and 1 the 2.5" bays?

This R510 has 8x 3.5" drive bays. My SAS drives are 2.5" but I have the Dell caddie spacer things..

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.

Couple terminology pieces...

Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.

They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.

Sorry, when I say OS in this case, I mean Hyper-V. I'm installing the bare-metal Windows Hyper-V 2016 hypervisor.