[THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same physical server
- From: Michael Pardee <pardeemp.list@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:10:29 -0500
I must be in the minority, or maybe I just drank too much of the Kool-Aid,
but we couldn¹t be happier with VMWare. It¹s 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 it¹s 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 aren¹t
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. We¹ll 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 couldn¹t 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] 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/>
>>
>>
>> steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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