[THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same physical server
- From: "Braebaum, Neil" <Neil.Braebaum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:13:44 -0000
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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