Building Windows 2000 & 2003 Best Practices

[vmNewb35]

There may be some recommendations for this via white paper somewhere, but I am trying to get a quick handle on reclaiming some SAN storage. We just attended the VI3 class and we built all the Windows servers with a 2 GB c-drive. Is this really an appropriate size for this kind of VM? Currently, our windows folks builds these with a 10GB c-drive...and when you have 40 of these in production, well the wasted SAN storage piles up.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

[dkfbp]

I would never build a production server with 2GB system partition. We currently build our VMWARE servers with 8GB. You really don't want to run out of disk space on your C drive. Therefore give it some room to grow.

[doubleH · Accepted solution]

IMO 2 gb is too small. I build mine like your windows guys with 10gb C drives. You need the extra space for service packs and the like. windows also does not perform that well when there is less than 20% free space on a volume and I'm guessing with that small of a partition you might be very close to this.

Microsoft recommends a minimum of 3.0gb...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/windowsserver/bb430827.aspx

[RParker]

A VM is really no different than a physical machine. The only difference is you can make the sizes exactly what you need.

If you need a 20gig C: drive, then you make a 20g drive. For performance, you can add drives, and put them on other luns.

But 2Gig may be the minimum size for boot partition, but I don't agree with this, I make all mine a big enough partition for everything, data, programs, etc.

So it's really up to you how big you want the VM to be.

I would start with something like 10g (with enough expansion room) and you can make it bigger later.

[Cloneranger]

If you dont have 400gb availiable on your SAN, then you probably dont have enough drives in to give adequate performance over 40 VMs anyway,

Just my thoughts,

I have a similar number of VMs and performance is the big issue not space,

I have 14x 146gb drives in 1+0 running my VMs, and thats just about enough to give decent performance for 40 VMs,

[vmNewb35]

Thanks to all for replying...you confirmed my thoughts on this. If we could have recouped some SAN storage that would have been nice.

Chad