I wouldn't disagree that the boundaries are moving, and the potential
pain is being reduced.
But whenever you virtualise - even with ever improving methods, you do
impose a hit (albeit, perhaps I accept, possibly diminishing in impact)
in performance - it's one more abstracted layer.
And at the end of the day, whilst many systems and environments have
some slack, and are not at capacity - by the same token - many are still
going to have to implement some systems where the OS and hardware is
going to be pushed hard - that's not ideal for virtualisation.
I'm not arguing against VMware or virtualisation - I'm merely staying
pragmatic about it - it's great for many things, and certainly a boon
for server rationalisation - but it's not everything to all people where
server hardware is concerned. And whilst some ground will always be
made, as technology improves, there are always some hard, awkward things
that can't be avoided.
Neil
_____
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Greenberg
Sent: 23 February 2007 15:14
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks
on same physical server
I think we all agree the VMWare is a great technology for lower
utilized systems. The point worth emphasizing again is that the
threshold is changing because of the massive performance coming off of
newer multi-core processors, i.e. we are now putting things on VMWare
that before we would only put on raw hardware.
Another point to consider is that VMWare is hardware
virtualization, OS virtualization is very mature now and does not suffer
from the same resource penalty inherent in VMWare. We are going to see
some very interesting things in this arena in 2007.....
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 Braebaum, Neil
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:59 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks
on same physical server
I don't think you're in the minority - read my comments
carefully ("Same with VMware - for certain things - app co-existence,
underutilised boxes - it's great.").
There's many scenarios it can be great for, but if you want the
most out of your tin, with either demanding apps, or OS requirements,
it's not ideal.
It's gone full-circle for me - these days the default tends to
be VMware, unless it's a scenario where up-front the requirements are
likely to be as in my previous sentence.
All I was really saying is that as a strategy it's getting
pushed - and application vendors are proving to be often reluctant to
commit to it - and it can be something of a battle to derail the
bandwagon if up-front you can see that the requirements may not be
ideally suited to a VM environment.
None of that is to say that I'm against it, or don't embrace
it's advantages and positives - I do - but just like any other aspect to
this techology, it's not an all-encompassing panacea, or silver bullet -
and it would be nice for the higher ups to be more pragmatic, than
simply assume that everything will fit in this one-size-fits-all box.
Neil
_____
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Pardee
Sent: 23 February 2007 13:10
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ
networks on same physical server
I must be in the minority, or maybe I just drank too
much of the Kool-Aid, but we couldn't be happier with VMWare. It's been
a great technology for us and has delivered on our goal of greater
server consolidation. We tend to use GSX for dev/test and ESX for
production. Some applications are actually seeing greater availability
with the Virtual Infrastructure/HA pieces, and performance has been
great. We put very little Citrix, SQL, Exchange, and F&P in VMWare
because it's not worth it to take resources away from other servers/apps
that could make better use of the resources. Things like DCs, web
servers, Web Interface, license servers, etc. have been great in VMWare,
and it has helped with disaster recovery and redundancy. Our costs
aren't looking too bad either. We buy fewer, larger servers with lots
of memory, but we then see 40-50 guests on that hardware. We have an
official goal of virtualizing 20% of our intel servers by the end of
2007, 35% by the end of 2008, and 50% by the end of 2009. We'll see if
we get there, but the first goal has almost been reached.
It reminds me a lot of Citrix way back in the day, where
you couldn't get vendors to officially support their products if you ran
them in a Citrix environment. Now that is almost unheard of. Same with
VMWare, but the Vendors are coming around.
We are currently testing boot from SAN from our IBM
Blades to our HP EVA 8000 storage. So far the testing is going very
well, but there is definitely a cost to doing it as the Blades need
daughter cards, the chassis need redundant Brocade switches, etc., but
we are looking to see if this actually increases our performance since
the IBM Blades give you no write cache for the internal drives = at
least with the HS20 model.
As always, your mileage will vary with all of this!
_____
From: "Braebaum, Neil" <Neil.Braebaum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 10:50:50 -0000
To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Conversation: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal /
DMZ networks on same physical server
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ
networks on same physical server
Agreed on all points - SAN disk being key to most large
infrastructures, but there's no such thing as a free lunch, there. It's
not a panacea for all disk requirements - and as you point out, for
certain usages is undesirable, and probably pointless.
Same with VMware - for certain things - app
co-existence, underutilised boxes - it's great. But if you want
performance and the most out of your tin, it's not where I'd go - if
nothing else you've got the OS overhead, plus the virtualised overhead.
It's a bit of a bandwagon, at the moment, and it just
seems that it's a case of no bandwagon too slow. Whereas in the past, we
may have had to fight to get things like VMware adopted, now we
seemingly have to fight to get things implemented on real tin, where
there's a case for it.
Neil
_____
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] <mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx%5d>
On Behalf Of Rick Mack
Sent: 23 February 2007 10:37
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/>
<http://www.thinclient.net/>
steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<mailto:steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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