We want to rename the machine and preserve all performance data in the SQL Server on the VirtualCenter.
What procedure would you recommend? DNS updates/changes, SQL statements and service console commands.
How to rename an ESX 3.5 server
virtualizationvmware-esx
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lets separate the issues:
SAS vs NL-SAS is very simple. While SAS drives are the proper SAS (i.e. SCSI drives with a serial connector and access protocol), NL-SAS is really a SATA disk with a SAS connector and access protocol. The advantage of NL SAS vs SATA is in the connector and protocol, because while you can use SATA disks connected to SAS controllers, you will suffer performance hits in addition to the disk slowness, because there will always be a protocol conversion between SCSI (the protocol SAS uses) and ATA (the protocol IDE and SATA use) So in the end, SAS vs NL-SAS is just the matter of RPMs, while SAS vs SATA was RPMs plus overhead
3.5" vs 2.5" is even easier - you choose between larger (in size, not capacity) and cheaper drives, and smaller and more expensive drives. The caveat of the larger and cheaper ones is the fact that you can fit much less of those on a backplane. I have two IBM 1U pizzaboxes in my server room, one can hold up to two 3.5" drives, and the other - up to 6 2.5" drives. This can not only give you more capacity, but can bring you up to a higher spindle count, which is a major factor when you need disk performance (and with VMs you probably will)
PERC6i will be able to handle whatever you put in that server, just create several raid arrays.
I would strongly advise against raid-0 no matter what the requirements are. It is simply too risky, especially if in case of a failure you'll end up restoring or recreating several VMs, instead of a single physical machine
The performance of a host will degrade instantly whenever "thrashing" occurs - continuous swapping in and out of memory pages under tight memory conditions.
You might have a memory leak somewhere. If the task manager does not show excessive memory usage for a single process (BTW, which value were you looking at? The task manager typically shows private bytes, though you should be looking for the "working set" for current physical memory usage), a kernel module/driver might be another possible candidate. Take a look at Process Explorer's memory statistics, especially the kernel memory usage - they will be more detailed and might get you a step further to resolution.
Best Answer
Changing the server name is easy enough - DNS and a tiny bit of console work but keeping the performance data up to date with it seems a bit too much trouble to me.