Best Practices for a Newbie

[qisinc]

I recently inherited a production HP DL360 Gen9 server with  ESXi platform and will need to use it for virtualizing a file sharing system for a small office.    We primarily rely on a couple of Access databases that are hammered fairly hard by 10-15 or so simultaneous users in spurts across the work week.    Part of the "inheritance" means we lost the Nasuni fileshare that was previously housed on the server and we won't be replacing the Nasuni software.

I've been in IT a long time, but am pretty new to vmware and virtualization.

I was thinking to virtualize a Windows 2016 Server on the platform for the file share.    My main goal is speed/performance for the database access.    The databases are less than 3Gb in size.

The server has a RAID-5 array of traditional hard drives with plenty of space, and then also a RAID-1 array of 800Gb of faster SAS SSD drives.

I also have plenty of RAM for a small RAM disk - if that is appropriate to use for a dedicated "fast" database file share.

Should I try to split the Win2016 OS system partition from the data partition - and then place the data solely on the fast RAID-1 array??    Or would it be about as good to just place the Win2016 OS & data partition both on the RAID-1 SSD??

Would it be appropriate to set up a 16-32Gb RAM disk for super fast performance?   

Are there any good documents discussing layout options for OS vs data vs disk type?   Or is this mainly just learned through experience??

Thanks for any advice!!

Howard

[scott28tt]

This sounds more like a Microsoft question than a VMware one.

[a_p_]

Or is this mainly just learned through experience??

Basically yes, that's likely the best option if you do not have exact performance requirements.

Personally, I think the Gen9 server is a pretty good option. Assuming that the SSDs/HDDs are connected to a "P"-class RAID controller with battery backed write-cache (BBWC/FBWC) for Write-Back operation, event the HDDs may be able to handle the load. Anyway, I'd definitely create the VM with separate virtual disks for OS, and Data which allows a migration to a different tier in case it's necessary.

In case the simulations that you've mentioned run on separate systems, you may also want to make sure that network bandwitch doesn't become the bottleneck.

André