We are a fairly small shop, running on hardware that is up to 12 years old (with OS' to match!). We made a decision (prob the wrong one, but I'm trying to move on from that) to buy a VRTX with 2 hosts and around 12 Tb of disk in the DAS. We are planning on replacing 11 physical servers with this config, and virtualize most of them into this environment. The servers are configured to take the load of what we are replacing, so I'm not really worried about that, just the config part (no, we don't have any money to pay for config services either) :( :(
Was initially going to set up as a HA Hyper-V cluster, but have since realized that's just too complex, and not really what we need. Everything is in the same rack, connected to the same switch, using 2 different UPSes, just didn't make sense for us. Part of the 'moving on speech earlier'.
hardware config is as follows:
- 2 of dual proc M630 Blades with 16Gb of RAM each
- 1 of R2401 1Gb Switch module (ports gi0/1 and gi0/3 are connected to Corp switch, gi0/2 & gi0/4 are not connected to anything, should they be?)
- 10 Tb usable disk installed in the DAS (currently 2 partitions, one for each server)
Questions I have at the moment (new to Hyper-V, and been looooonngg time since I did any switch configuration).
- As this is 'just' going to be DAS-connected-to-servers, do I need to configure VLANs for this? (we are not going to have automagic VM failover capability)
- If I connect gi0/2 & gi0/4 to Corp network also, will that give the blades increased throughput? or will it just cause us to have to configure VLANs? (which is fine, I'm trying to do the best with what I have, just need to know)
- Each blade sees the 4 internal Ports on the 2401, yay! When I'm configuring Hyper-V, I am under the impression I need to configure 1 virtual switch for 3 of the ports and assign the 4th to the Hyper-V private network, is that correct?
- Or do I need to configure it differently? I was thinking I'd have to use teaming, to aggregate the connection, but the external is still only 1Gb, so it won't make a difference, right? can you tell Hyper-V networking is a challenge for me? I've read everything I can on it, and still makes me crazy trying to figure it out.
If I've missed anything obvious, (besides the platform booboo) please also let me know about that too.
thanks so much for your time!