Toby DiPasquale on 15 Sep 2007 00:28:57 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] help me design my server


On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 10:50:34AM -0400, W. Chris Shank 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. 

Amazon works around this problem by giving each Xen instance a disk on its
own spindle. This may not work for you, but I'm just putting it out
there...

-- 
Toby DiPasquale
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