Re: [PLUG] help me design my server

["Brian Stempin" <brian.stempin@gmail.com>]

Perhaps a SAN of some sort?

If you devote a small RAID1 array to each VM, this will ensure that you have the proper disk bandwidth to run it's respective OS.  If you then tack on a FC or iSCSI SAN, your bottleneck becomes the application speed and not the VM performance itself.  As noted by Matt, this can be fixed by adding more controllers (in this case, FC or 10GigE adapters).

On 9/14/07, W. Chris Shank <shankwc@acetechgroup.com> wrote:

I need to spec-out and architect another VMWare and/or Xen VM host server. Currently I have one with 8 cores, 4GB ram, and 1.5TB HDD as 4 500GB SATA with hardware raid5. We are starting to hit the wall with this setup  running 5 VMs on it. Particularly, it seems the HDD I/O is the bottleneck. If one VM hits the disks hard it makes the others pretty much useless.

So I have a budget to get another honking server. I'm confident the quad-core Xeons with the vm extensions are sufficient. I'll go ahead and bump the RAM to 16G too. The area I'm most concerned with is the disk I/O. I'm thinking that instead of one big RAID5, I'll pair smaller drives - so i'll have 4 sets of 2 250G SATA mirrors. Then direct it so that 2-3 VMs are on each raid.  Or should I go SCSI and keep one large RAID5?

So if you had the $$, what would you get and how would you configure it.

Thanks

--
W. Chris Shank
ACE Technology Group, LLC
www.myremoteITdept.com
(610) 640-4223

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