[THIN] Re: OT: VMWare ESX 3.x Internal / DMZ networks on same physical server
- From: "Rick Mack" <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:37:26 +1000
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
steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Other related posts:
