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

Seems like we are only talking about Citrix/TS?  I would thing your network
interface would become more of a bottleneck when in comes to profiles and
printing?   What kind of impact does Citrix's UPD or third-party apps (Screw
Drivers, ThinPrint) have on the disk sub-system vs the old fashion way?  How
much of an impact does the pagefile have these days?

SAN booting is been less prevalent because most storage vendors are idiots.
The introduction of blades systems is slowing changing that.  What about
Ardence?  Now that Citrix has purchased, I'm sure it's going to get a big
push soon.  Running that over the Network would surely be slower than Fibre
Channel?

Joe

On 2/23/07, Braebaum, Neil <Neil.Braebaum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


 Rick was quite specific of the scenarios where he consider latency - and
it wasn't purely booting - but things like pagefiles, profiles, and printing
spool areas.

It's for reasons like this, that whilst SAN filesystems for servers has
been prevalent for some time - given the nature of application use of
storage, and impressive caching with SAN storage, SAN booting has been less
prevalent, and some of that will come down to OS behaviour, and the nature
of the storage.

Neil

 ------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Steve Greenberg
*Sent:* 23 February 2007 15:28
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same
physical server

 So are you saying that SAN boot disks suffering from latency issues? I am
trying to get a clear answer here- does your OS/Application performance
suffer as a result of pure SAN booting??

 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 8:14 AM
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same
physical server

Just to point out the subtle, yet poignant, difference between throughput
and latency...

Neil

 ------------------------------

*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Steve Greenberg
*Sent:* 23 February 2007 15:11
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [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!



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