virtual machine for my documents and user profiles

[RUG201110141]

Has anybody used a virtual machine for the purposes of centralizing storage of users my documents and portions of user profiles? I was wondering if anybody had any guidance or tips based on there expeirence. We have three locations and we are going to setup three virtual machines. One for each locations. Then setup a gpo that would direct users profiles to these virtual machines. The storage that I've been requested to allocate is significantly large. About 1 1/2 to 2TB's in each locations and there are several hundred users in each location. I won't know what kind of workload is being generated on these virtual machines until we start testing so I don't know if a single virtual machine will suffice or if it is better to seperate the workload into multiple virtual machines. Any suggestions.

[Chris_S_UK]

So in this respect the VMs will really only be fileservers, athough the load on the servers and the network connections will be very high in the morning (when users logon) and probably very low at other times of the day. It'll probably peak again in the evening when users logoff and their profiles are saved.

I wouldn't imagine the VMs would need much memory (512mb maybe) but I would suggest creating a "bond" 2 or even 3 physical NICs to form a virtual switch and dedicate that vswitch (and thus the physical NICs) to these VMs.

Then ensure that the VMs are load balancing properly across the NICs, rather than using one all the time and the others only for fault tolerance only.

Chris