Windows 2008 in PVE 2.0

[lp86]

I am going to be setting up a dual Xeon E5620 based supermicro system for a client, he is wanting to use Windows 2008, I wanted to know if anyone had any recommended settings for that OS, like disk storage type, drivers, etc.

The system has 8 drives with a 3ware 9650SE raid card, I am most likely going to use RAID 6 with 5 drives for the OS/PVE, and 2 drives in RAID1 for backups, and the remaining drive for a hot spare.

 

[cesarpk]

I am going to be setting up a dual Xeon E5620 based supermicro system for a client, he is wanting to use Windows 2008, I wanted to know if anyone had any recommended settings for that OS, like disk storage type, drivers, etc.

The system has 8 drives with a 3ware 9650SE raid card, I am most likely going to use RAID 6 with 5 drives for the OS/PVE, and 2 drives in RAID1 for backups, and the remaining drive for a hot spare.

Hi lp86
- For Drivers I suggest using "virtio" for the network and virtual HDD, is the best in performance, in the howto of Proxmox there is good documentation about virtio drivers. See also about qcow2 and raw for virtual HDD
- I suggest to make backups on another computer, imagine that decomposes the only PC that contains everything (either processor, memory, raid controller, etc..), You can not recover anything until repaired. and with other PC using NFS, any node "Proxmox" can access your copies of VMs, in the howto of Proxmox there is good documentation about NFS

 

[charnov]

We run 2008 R2 on E5620's (Dell R410) and run VirtIO drivers. Works great. Follow the wiki and you should be good.

 

[lp86]

He also has a Windows 2003 SBS system I want to transfer to a virtual machine as well, what would be the best tool to do that?

 

[cesarpk]

He also has a Windows 2003 SBS system I want to transfer to a virtual machine as well, what would be the best tool to do that?

Please see http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE

 

[charnov]

I had the best luck with CloneZilla Live. Was able to clone across the network very quickly.

 

[oeginc]

I had the best luck with CloneZilla Live. Was able to clone across the network very quickly.

I second this, CloneZilla Live worked awesome and I set it to only copy the used filespace and created qcow2 disk on server so it expands as needed. As for the drivers, virtio for hard drives for sure, although I've read in several places to stick with the latest intel network drivers for ethernet in production systems as they are almost as fast as virtio but more stable..