Hi all,
I'm really a rookie in vmware, as well as in virtualization world.
Recently I have bought my first server Dell R610 with 2xXeons X5570, 48GB RAM, 4x146 15K SAS drives and 4 NICs.
I have installed ESX-i 5.1 on this machine and I have two main questions about the performance:
1. What is the reasonable amount of virtual machines I can host on this environment? What do you predict? I still have 2 empty drives, so possibly machine can be 6x146GB in RAID 10 or 5, which gives ~400-700GB of disk space. Also 6 empty RAM slots, which can be filled with another 48GB.
Size of my disk array is really not important, vm disks can be 20GB or less. My concern now is about performance of this RAID array, as well as CPU/RAM and NICs.
I'm planning to run VPS service business in future, and I need to know the number of average machines with Windows Server 2012 that you can run on this host? How many IOPS and throughput does regular VM need? By regular, I mean a VM that you can buy from average hosting company for average price.
2. Can I install 2xSATA SSD (consumer not enterprise) disk on separate RAID controller and still use it as a Cache for those 4 SAS drives? Does ESXi support such configuration? Does ESXi support TRIMM command in RAID?
I really appreciate your advices.