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I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 and there are 3 SATA 7200 drives (2 x 1TB, 1 x 300GB) and one SAS 15k drive (1 x 300GB).

I want to install Ubuntu as the host OS with several guest OSes.

Should I install the host OS (Ubuntu) on the fastest drive? Or should one of the guest OSes be on the faster drive?

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You should put the Host on the fastest as it is running the guests so if it is slow, they in turn will also be slow. To be honest I would put them all on the fastest drive and put the data on the big drives, this way you wont get as much fragmentation of your OS then, plus everything is running off the fast drive then.

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-1 for mentioning putting all the guests on the same disk. The I/O load will almost certainly be too high -- spreading the I/O load amongst available spindles makes much more sense if there's going to be more than a handful of guests. Also, if the host is only doing VM hosting, it's not going to benefit from speedy I/O nearly as much as the guests -- the OSes doing the real work -- will. – afrazier Jan 27 at 15:01
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Mirror drives in pairs in RAID BIOS, install system on smallest mirror

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Can you please explain what that means? Should they mirror all four drives? How can you install a system on "the smallest mirror"? If they're mirrored, you'll install it everywhere. – slhck Jan 27 at 14:23
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