[THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same physical server

Rick,

 

This is very interesting. I was under the impression that SAN booted
hardware servers would be faster than local disk given the 2GB throughput of
fiber channel and the efficiency of the SAN platform (spanning many
spindles). Are you saying it is actually slower??

 

Steve Greenberg

Thin Client Computing

34522 N. Scottsdale Rd D8453

Scottsdale, AZ 85262

(602) 432-8649

www.thinclient.net

steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

  _____  

From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Rick Mack
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 3:37 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same
physical server

 

Hi Steve,

 

VMs aside, there are still a couple of significant areas where SAN disks
just don't hack it as a system disk. 

 

The first is latency which can be 4-5 times worse on a SAN "disk" (overhead
of fabric switch and other infrastructure) compared to local disks. I know
that DR etc is a lot easier with SAN disks than local hard disks, but if you
decide to go SAN boot and still want want real performance then you'd better
at least consider using the local hard disks for paging, spooling and user
profiles. 

 

The second issue is price. Even with 72 GB disks where most of the disk
space is wasted, SAN disk space still costs quite a bit more than RAID
mirrored local drives.

 

I have a suspicion that there will be a time in the near future when people
will start realising that that VMWare isn't nearly as cost effective as
everyone argues. Please don't get me wrong, I love the idea of VMWare and
just wouldn't do without it. It's just that VMWare isn't really about saving
money once we get away from a development environment. 

 

And until we can overcome disk and network i/o bottlenecks, having more CPU
power to play with just isn't all that critical. Of course there are things
like Vista/Longhorn's flash drive read/write caching that even things up a
bit but what we really need is the next generation of hard disks that have
obscenely large on-board caches. That'll let them run at close to the
interface speeds (eg up to 6 Gb per disk on SASI). 

 

regards,

 

Rick

 

On 2/23/07, Steve Greenberg <steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nice! This is one of those mind set changes that we periodically have to go
through. I am going through one right now with the idea of booting servers
off the SAN, in the old days this was flaky but I have to update my thinking
and accept that it works and is trustworthy! 

 

Steve Greenberg

Thin Client Computing

34522 N. Scottsdale Rd D8453

Scottsdale, AZ 85262

(602) 432-8649

www.thinclient.net <http://www.thinclient.net/>  

steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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