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Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV

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G'day Jim,

It doesn't matter if you are running with virtualized servers or on
bare metal - the characteristics of your RAID array are constant. What
WILL make a difference is the RAID controller being used, and also the
speed of the drives. With a virtualized environment you are likely to
see much more disk activity associated with multiple OS'es and higher
overall CPU utilization

I'd question the 10K drives. If you can't justify $$D, then I'd at
least spring for 15K ... I'm assuming the controller will be
supporting something like 6Gb SAS?

Though I've been an advocate of RAID-10 ('cause you can be doing 2
concurrent reads!), the latest tests we have performed highlighted
that with the right controller, the performance differentiation
between RAID-10 and RAID-50 wasn't as large as you might expect ...
and given that with many workloads the read:write ratio might be
around 10:1, I wouldn't get too hung up on the write delay (and more
disks in a RAID-50 array has more of a performance impact than more
drives with RAID-10 (and with $$D's, RAID-5/50 makes more financial
sense anyway :-)

In terms of virtualization in production environments, we have had
people leveraging virtualization for 5+ years now, and have used
Virtual Server, Hyper-V and VMware. The only environment we have had
issues with has been XEN, though we didn't establish the environment,
and we had played with XEN internally without issue previously, but we
still don't have anyone running production workloads with XEN at the
moment.

We have done quite extensive performance testing on all of these,
comparing performance to bare metal installs, and importantly also
looking at perfomance characteristics with heavy workloads running in
multiple simultaneous virtual environments ... If you don't have a
platform preference, running your own tests is likely to be
"illuminating"

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Thread

Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV JJCSR <JCronin@ktp.com> - 2011-02-09 08:22 -0800
  Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV JJCSR <JCronin@ktp.com> - 2011-02-09 11:49 -0800
    Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV Ross Ferris <rossf@stamina.com.au> - 2011-02-09 15:49 -0800
  Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV GlenB <batchelg@bellsouth.net> - 2011-02-11 18:38 -0800
  Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV RichC <cheseroo@hotmail.com> - 2011-02-09 10:27 -0800
  Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV x <lucian_pata@yahoo.com> - 2011-02-10 08:57 -0800
    Re: Server-Virtualization and RAID for MV and non-MV JJCSR <JCronin@ktp.com> - 2011-02-10 11:47 -0800

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