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. 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