I'm looking to put together a server with the base OS as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper V. This machine is a development box that will be hosting multiple VMs for development - test instances of various Microsoft flavors as well as a Team Foundation Server VM.
I want the machine to have raid 5 across 4 1 TB drives. I'm not concerned with the "lesser performance" of Raid5. Other's have said raid 5 in a VM environment works just fine. Besides, this isn't an azure server. It's a development VM server.
My question is, what should I be aware of when picking out the hardware for this box? Do any of you who have built similar setups have any suggestions or considerations that I should be aware of?
Above all else since you mentioned this is going to be a Dev server you should know not to experience the same performance as a physical server when it comes to SQL (not sure about Oracle). You can find documentation that will tell you that it is possible to get near native (92-96% performance) and that may be possible but in my experience you will usually see closer to 80% of what you would see physical, in terms of both capacity and end user experience from an application perspective.
As a general rule I would consider how many guests you plan on running utilizing more than 1 Virtual Processor and or more than 1/2 GB of memory. Utilizing more is perfectly acceptable, but running 8 single core VMs on an 8 core box is not the same as running4 2 core boxes because of the way virtual resources are handed out. In my personal experience it seems we always underestimate the amount of memory we are going to want in a virtual server, we started with 64GB in each of our virtual hosts, only to upgrade to 128GB and no several of our servers we are still wishing for more.