Reccomended Settings for a single VM

[ItalianSkydiver]

Hi,
I have a newbie question,
I have a brand new server with a Xeon E5-2630v4, 32gb ram, 2 ssd 500gb and 2 sata 1tb disks.
The server will have inside ONLY 1 VM with Windows Server Essential 2016.
Wich are the reccomended settings for this kind of machine? It's better to give to the VM all the 32gb of ram?
It's ok to use 2 zfs raid (a raid 1 with the ssd and a raid 1 with the 1tb disks, one for the OS and one for the storage?)
I'll use Virtio drivers too.

Thanks in advance for your answer.

 

[LnxBil]

Why would you run only one VM and therefore have such a complicated stack of software? What is your goal with the machine?

ZFS is only fast if it has enough RAM. Per default, up to half you total RAM is used for ZFS (ARC). If you limit this by using a lot of RAM for your VMs you will not have good performance inside your guest. So you can technically use 32 GB for your VM (even more), but it'll be very slow with respect to ZFS and to swapping, because the Hypervisor also needs RAM.

Please elaborate more what you want to do.

 

[gkovacs]

Hi,
I have a newbie question,
I have a brand new server with a Xeon E5-2630v4, 32gb ram, 2 ssd 500gb and 2 sata 1tb disks.
The server will have inside ONLY 1 VM with Windows Server Essential 2016.

What is your reason behind virtualization if you only run one VM? Easy backup? Portability to another host? Because IO performance will be MUCH lower compared to a bare metal server.

Wich are the reccomended settings for this kind of machine? It's better to give to the VM all the 32gb of ram?

- Of your 10 core CPU I would give 8 cores to the VM, and leave 2 for the host for stable performance even if the VM is under full load
- I would set CPU type to "host", so all the processor features (like AES acceleration) would work under KVM
- I would only give as much RAM to the VM as it needs (start with 8GB, give more if you see it's running low), but never more than 20-24GB on a 32GB system

It's ok to use 2 zfs raid (a raid 1 with the ssd and a raid 1 with the 1tb disks, one for the OS and one for the storage?) I'll use Virtio drivers too.

I would install Proxmox on the 2 mirrored SSDs in ZFS RAID1 (rpool), and would create another RAID1 pool out of the 2 HDDs (zpool). I would create the Windows VM with at least 2 Virtio SCSI disks, first one on rpool (Windows OS and frequently accessed data), second one on zpool (storage).