Thanks everyone, and thanks Roy, that is some good info. Drew Soto Cano AB
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Ashcraft, Roy W CTR USAF AFWA 2 SYOS/SYOO <roy.ashcraft....@offutt.af.mil> wrote: > I'm not sure what they expect to happen. We have been running our dev/test > systems in a virtual cluster for about 18 months and our operational systems > for just over a year. If anything, the virtual systems benchmark slightly > faster than the physical systems (depending on the applications, this ranged > from 5 to 25% faster on the virtual server compared to a physical server > running on the same hardware as the virtual system). > > Our dev/test cluster is comprised of 4 DL380's, fairly hefty with 32GB of > RAM. We utilize all of about 2GB of drive space on each server, just for > VMware ESX Server 4.0 OS. All of the virtual images are on an enterprise > storage solution connected through fibre channel. We're running 23 virtual > systems on four physical boxes, including a development Remedy app and web > server, a test Remedy app and web server, an MSSQL server utilized for about > a half dozen different application in addition to the Remedy dev/test > applications. All of the physical boxes are connected to the various network > segments, allowing the virtual systems to run on any physical host. Even > with this load, the virtual db and Remedy servers benchmark faster than they > did on the physical systems. From what I've gathered in digging through > everything, the reason for this is that the virtual server only need to load > a handful of drivers rather than the hundreds that are loaded for the > physical server. The hyper visor virtualizes all of the hardware and this > frees up the guest OS to run only what is required to function rather than > having to deal with the myriad various pieces of the hardware. > > Use of the virtual cluster has a lot of other advantages besides the cost > savings for hardware. All of our server have high availability, without any > of the complexities and foibles requires for clustering. Fault tolerance and > resource balancing happen automatically. The virtual manager automatically > restarts failed servers, moves servers between the physical hosts as load > shifts during the course of the day, automatically generates snapshot images > on a scheduled basis than can be restored in a matter of minutes, etc. These > benefits are what drove us to virtualize our operational systems, the faster > benchmarks were just a nice side effect. > > After running with virtualized and non-virtualized servers, I don't see any > benefit to running a physical system unless you have to for some reason > specific to the software you are running. Even then, I would probably try it > in a virtual environment just to make sure the information that I had on why > it couldn't run there is accurate. (Case in point, I was told repetitively > that I could not run Win 2k8 in a VMware environment, after I had been > running a pair of boxes for over six months.) > > Thanks, > Roy > _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
