Hi folks,

Just after a bit of advice about the RAID hard drive setup on a new physical host we are putting in to run a couple of virtual SQL servers. I am looking at putting in a Dell 2950 with 16gb RAM (with space for another 16gb taking it to 32gb) and a lot of direct attached storage. My question is really around the RAID config. I am looking at running possibly 3 machines at needing about 300-500gb each storage each.

I know for physical servers we try to setup the system, transaction logs and data files on separate disks. Some of our servers were split between two raid controllers and a number of physical disks. Do we still need to plan the virtual machines along the same lines. I was thinking that we do not need to set them up in the same manner as the underlying physical setup is different. I am thinking about putting the system os on a 20gb partition and a massic 300gb data partition.

At the moment we do not have a budget for shared storage but I am hoping we can get something sorted in the next few months.

I am thinking about whether to go with RAID 5 (5 or 6 x 1tb SAS or SATA drive) or RAID 1+0 with a number of 1TB drives. What setup is going to give me the best performance? I have heard stuff about the more spindles the better. I'm assuming spindles means drives!

We are going to be converting/migrating 2 machines that are running on dual AMD 2218 2.6ghz with 4gb RAM on direct storage. Just run a few sql counters over one of the boxes and it is averaging between 60-100 transactions per second the other box is averaging about 350 per sec. We are also looking at upgrading SQL from 2000 to 2005.

Any tips and ideas gratefully received