I have a client wanting better performance of their Sage (Accpac & CRM) server (v5.5, soon to be v7).

It's running on 1 of 2 Hyper-V VMs (Svr2008) on a Dell PE T410 server with 24GB of RAM (1333MHz) & dual quad-core, and both VMs (only their C: drives) are on a single RAID5 array. All clients connect via 1Gb ethernet. The 2nd VM is SBS2008 with 9GB RAM (& all SBS dbs & company data are on a separate RAID5 array), & 3GB RAM for the Svr2008 hypervisor.

I've given the Sage/MSSQL VM all the RAM I can (12GB) & SQL RAM caching (~8GB, never exceeds ~7.5GB, eg. entire db can now be cached in RAM) and that's helped significantly.

Upgrading the Hypervisor to Svr2012 is an obvious step, but probably not a dramatic improvement?

What about an SSD for this Sage/SQL VM (VM = 100GB, <10GB for the actual live DB) ?

Can SSDs be put into the SAS hot-swap bays? Or will I have to use the mobo SATA(3Gbps?) ports, or PCI-E SSD card?

Should SSDs be RAIDed for this situation? Or is SSD's higher reliability offsetting the need for RAID1/5/10? (I have nightly full disk backups)

New territory for me, would appreciate some feedback. Thanks, Anthony.