My main pc has a 500gb ssd running Windows Server 2016 Dataserver preview 5 as a OS disk and 4 2 tb mechanical drives for VM's.

Pc specs: Dual Xeon E5 2670's with 64 gb of ram.

THIS IS A PLAY/LEARNING PC.!!

I do not work in the IT industry it is a hobbie so do not slam me for unsafe practices because I have found out that's the best way to learn by fixing my screw ups."oh so thats why your not supposed to do it that way"

I currently have the 4 2 TB hard drives set up as RAID0 via my bios and Windows shows a 6.91 TB Raid 0 volume in Server Manager/Disks.

I am not worried about losing data on the array. Nothing is on the disks currently and nothing important will be put on them.

I want to add a few VM's and am unsure how I should use the 4 2TB disks.

Looking for the best performance with what I have while I play around with Hyper V so should I get rid of the raid array and use the 4 individual disks as a pool, or use the Raid0 array as my pool or not create a pool at all and just use it as a Raid0 for my VM's




EDIT: I already have the Server 2016 RTM 180 day trial, I just want to hold off installing that while this preview 5 version still has some time on it.




Raid0 performance, not too bad.

Well i'm rolling with the Raid0 array for my Hyper V VM's.

Hardware RAID 0 will give you highest performance.

Software RAID in general is not a good idea if you care about data protection but for OP's purpose I don't think he would gain much if anything from a hardware RAID setup.

That's about how much he'll gain.  Roughly.



Storage Spaces can do a bunch of things the dedicated RAID can't, but it's unlikely he will be needing those things that storage spaces will gain him.  At least not yet, we'll see how far he takes his learning project.

Thats what I was thinking, so I dove right in.

Installing Windows 7 first.

Edit: Went pretty painlessly, now updating.......and updating......and updating......

Build golden image pre-updated, install from that.  

Installing Windows Server 2008 r2 x64.

I am installing legit versions of windows, I used to have a MS Technet subscription back when it was only a few hundred dollars.

When I built my pc that I built in 2009 it was almost the same price for a retail copy of windows 7 ultimate and a Technet subscription for a year.

So far I really  like Windows Server 2016 AND hyper-V.


I needed to install a version of Office so I installed Office 2007 Ultimate, I have never installed and I have the keys for it.

I had copied the install file and I double clicked on what I thought was a install file, I was actually a ISO image and Win 2016 server automatically mounted it as a virtual dvd drive F: and installed off of that.

FREAKING COOL!!

So Hyper-V runs on Windows 10.  Does anyone know if it's possible to run it on windows 10 IoT?

So no Hyper-V on my Raspberry Pi?

I can't even right now.

 
Meh, just Swarm it.  

OpenBSD is sure a whole lot easier to install than it used to be.

Finally got time to play around installing some vm's, not really doing anything with them yet just getting familiar with installing different o.s.'s.



                             
And yes I am also playing World of Tanks also.