We're building a development Hyper-V server that will be shared among 4-6 .Net developers. We'll be running mostly Win2k8R2 VMs with services including MSSQL, SharePoint, TFS, continuous integration, etc. Again, this is a dev machine used for development and testing - so no production-grade SQL performance is expected - but IO is certainly a concern in any virtualized environment.
We'll be getting an old production-class server for this purpose after it is replaced with new hardware in about 6 months, so in the meantime we'll be using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation with 24GB RAM (triple channel) with 4x1TB Samsung F3 drives.
So given that a) this is the hardware we have to work with, and b) the machine comfortably fits (only) 4 drives, and has onboard (fake)RAID, what is the best configuration for performance?
I'm having a hard time thinking of a better option than running everything (OS + VMs) on a single RAID-10 array using all 4 drives.
Any other thoughts?
