Okay, so I am looking at possibly picking up an older HP server from savemyserver.com and just want to make sure it will work well for what I want, which will be basicly hosting VM,s VIA proxmox. Right now i’m just using my old gaming machine a i7 870@ 2.66Ghz, 16gb ram and a 1tb WD Red. This works okay, but has really bad I/O delay when getting more then one or two vms running, and even worse if they are windows vms sometimes its upwards of 30% drive I/O delay, also it’s not enough ram.
Current Projected Usage:
Several Linux VM's running minecraft server, teamspeak, NAS backup and testing new distros.
Setting up a Windows Server 2012 Domain with Active Directory, DHCP, DNS and other stuff for learning/testing. Possibly server clustering.
Several Windows OS's to be used in the testing/learning Domain.
The server i am looking at would be specced as so:
CPU: 2x 2.9Ghz xeon quadcore no HT
Ram: 24GB ECC maybe 32GB DDR2
HDD: 8 300GB 10k sata probably going to be in raid 5 using 7 drives with one hot spare.
What I am wondering is will this substantially improve the performance of the VMs?
Would 15k sas drives be noticeable better? Or would the 10k sata drives be fine?
The CPU i have currently is not a problem has plenty of usage to spare so I think I would be okay with the same amount of cores plus they would be all physical instad of 4 logical.
I would consider using BTRFS instead of RAIDing them together.
In terms of improving performance of VMs over what you currently have: Yes. The only issue I see, is that it's and old Xeon, but it should still pack a bit of a punch. The higher volume of memory will help quite a bit in VM performance.
As for the Drives, 8, 10k Drives will blow away the WD Red. I would make sure the RAID controller in the system is operating properly, and that the battery (if it has one) is functional.
As for a noticeable difference with 15k SAS drives: it really depends on how many VMs you are running, and how much they access the local storage.