Size of your C drive?

[juchestyle]

Hey All,

I was curious what you use as your standard size for virtual machines, specifically your c drive? Is 8 gigs or 10 gigs enough for a 2003 micro$soft server?

Let me know your thoughts, I have points to award!

Respectfully,

Matthew

Kaizen!

[outbacker]

10 gb works perfect, everything installed on D.

[DigitalVoodoo]

Here's another vote for 10GB - it's the perfect size for our Windows VMs, and is a nice round number to boot!

[Cameron2007]

I had VMs that I built using HP RDP server and initially the scripts were set for 10G C :drives, 20G D;. Built the machines and they worked OK. We then had to undergo migration from the existing EVA to Netapp storage on live servers where they didn't want to backup page files etc so VMware converted these to 8G and added seperate page files and there has been no deterioration in the VMs. 8G looks OK to me

[jrenton]

I have been using 8Gb partitions for all of my Windows 2003 SP2 servers and have had no issues with disk space. As long as you monitor the available free space on your servers at regular intevals you will avoid any issues where you run out of free space.

[Jasemccarty · Accepted solution]

I really depends on what your machines do.

I've got 200+ "cookie cutter" guests running Windows 2000, and they do fine with 2GB.

Don't get me lying about my 130+ SQL guests.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

[juchestyle]

Hey Jase,

Did you really mean to say 2 GB? How is that possible? Some of my vms are running out of space at 10 gigs???

Respectfully,

Matthew

Kaizen!

[Jasemccarty]

WTF?

Where did my post go?

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

[esiebert7625]

Depends on what the server is going to do. I'm assuming you plan on having a separate D drive for applications and depending on how much RAM your VM will have you will need a chunk of space for a swap file. I tend to give my VM's as little space as possible, especially if they are on SAN disk, it's pretty easy to expand them afterwards if needed. For small servers that have a minimal need for application data (like DC's and web servers) 8-12GB works for me. If I give the VM less then 1GB of RAM then the swap file will be small and I can get away with 8GB, otherwise I go a bit higher if the VM has more RAM. Also I never copy the install ISO directory to the server anymore like I did with physical servers since you can easily mount an ISO on your VM at anytime.

Eric Siebert

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[juchestyle]

h2. WTF?

Where did my post go?

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Jase,

Something weird is going on with the forums this morning, I can see your replies, but they take awhile to show up. For the first hour I couldn't see any replies at all, it wasn't until I logged out and came back in that I could actually see anything. That's it I am going home!

Respectfully,

Matthew

Kaizen!

[Jasemccarty]

Yep... 2GB

I'm probably going to migrate them to 4GB at sometime in the near future...

The SQL boxes have 10GB...

Just don't ask how many .vmdk's I have on each LUN.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

[Rockapot]

Our VM's (Server 2003) have 10Gb allocated to the system disk.

Carl