Surgient Success

One of our customers would like to create a vm for a 500 GB database to display in their VDMS system.  The content host is MSVS which has limitations on SCSI drives so we are attempting to create the server config with IDE drives.  Unfortunately, we are limited to 4 total drives and IDE drives can only be so big, so we are running out of space.

Any thoughts on how we might be able to accomplish this?  Perhaps integrating a physical server with our virtual environment? 

SCSI is slower (I think) but if you install the right drivers, it should work and I think the drive limitation for that is in the TB range.  What limitation would you hit using SCSI?

 Also, I know that the IDE expanding drive has a small GB limit (120? 125?) - but is it possible to do that as a fixed drive and have it larger?  I don't know the answer to that one....

Microsoft does not recommend virtualizing certain performance sensitive or large workloads such as a big database or Exchange Server.  Your best bets are to use VMware (i.e. cross-platform host) or use a physical server on that workload and refresh it either by script (truncating tables, etc) or re-initializing the data set.

The limits on virtual disks for MSVS are 127 GB (IDE) and 2 TB (SCSI).  The more troublesome limitation for virtual SCSI are base images are not sharable between virtual machines even with undo disks enabled.  This is a regression introduced either in MSVS R2 or R2 SP1 that we reported to them and they elected to not to address the problem.