Hey Bruce, On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 01:48:40PM -0400, bruce bruce wrote: > I am stack between two identical systems (2U Twin2, 4 nodes, SuperMicro) > servers that have the same exact specs except for HDDs. These nodes will all > either have Asterisk installed with CentOS or will have Asterisk install in > virtual environment. > > Option 1: *12* x 3.5" HDD (3 HDDs per node) > Option 2: *24* x 2.5" HDD (6 HDDs per node) > **both options come to the same price.
I'm not sure why disk access (especially in the SAS age) should be a limiting factor. I reckon the only thing that you need to consider is the ammount of CPU horsepower that you'll need. > Other than the price difference (2.5" is more expensive and can't find many > of the 1TB or so....) is there any preference, advantage, or disadvatage of > chosing 2.5" HDD or 3.5" when it comes to the server operations or Asterisk > operation? And another question would be, why you would need so much disk space? :) Keep in mind, that if this is going to become the cornerstone of your virtualization infrastructure, then its totally different. Though keep in mind the security implications of consoldation, i.e. Security First! > Each node of this server will be running CentOS 5.5 either in 64 or 32 bit + > Asterisk or they will be used for virtual environment where multiple > instance of Asterisk will be installed within CentOS XEN. Ah, good choice here. CentOS with Xen is what I run as well on one of my installations. If you want to get the latest Xen Versions, especially if you're just testing, make sure to take a look a look at the gitco xen repositories [1]. They'll get you up and running real quick. Trust is another question, which I'll leave up to you ;) [1] http://www.gitco.de/repo/ For domUs, I run debian/ubuntu, because of xen-tools [2] (shameless plug, I'm an author) with which its really easy to make "disposable", minimal VMs. Though there are only xen-tools packages for debian, installing it on CentOS is really, really easy, like I said I do it on one of my installations. [2] http://xen-tools.org/ [3] http://gitorious.org/xen-tools/xen-tools So thats one way to go, and I did just that for one of my installations, but that was a while back. This may be a discussion for another forum (no pun intended), but I would like to emphasize, that it might be worthwhile to take a look at Debian Squeeze (Currently testing, but near release) as your dom0 of choice. As you must know by now, Red Hat dropped Xen in RHEL and CentOS will do the same in the next itteration. Debian on the other hand seems to have the best and most commited Xen support nowadays. With Debian Squeeze you get a 2.6.32 kernel (and the 2.6.18 of CentOS *shudders*) and you also get Xen 4. One other alternative that turned up recenty on the xen-tools mailing list, which sounded very good, was Debian Lenny with a 2.6.32 from backports and a self-compiled xen 3.4. I mean you could also get XenServer of course, however don't ask me about the licensing. In any case, Xen shouldn't slow you down enough to matter, so I would definately virtualize to have more options. Just remember to disable checksum offloading, the ancient xen bug [4][5] ;) [4] http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq#head-4ce9767df34fe1c9cf4f85f7e07cb10110eae9b7 [5] http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-04/msg00032.html To sum things up, I think virtualization is a good idea, especially when you have beefy servers (I do it too). So a green light from me! All the best, D. -- Dmitry Nedospasov <[email protected]> -- Twitter: @nedos Web: http://nedos.net -- Github: http://github.com/nedos -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
