Here we were back in 2001-2003 buying up cheap 1U dual proc ~4GB RAM server with a 1-4 drives in them and putting them all over the datacenter. It all made a lot of sense in the push to having lots of smaller, cheaper components.
Now with virtualization it seems we're back to buying big Iron again. I'm seeing a lot more 128GB RAM 8-core servers with 4 GigE drops and FC attatched storage to SANs. Has anyone really costed this out to figure out what makes sense here? An awful lot of our virtualization needs at work *could* be solved simply by taking some moderately sized servers (we have lots of 16GB 4-core servers lying around) and chopping them up into virts and running all the apps that we have 4 copies of that do *nothing at all*. Lots of the apps we have require 1% CPU, 1% I/O, 1% network bandwidth and maybe an image with 512MB-1GB or RAM (and *never* peak above that) -- and I thought the idea behind virtualization was to take existing hardware and just be more efficient with it. Instead I'm seeing those apps moved onto BigIron and BigStorage with an awful lot of new capex and licensing spending on VMware. So where, exactly are the cost savings? So, did I just turn into a dinosaur in the past 5 years and IT has moved entirely back to large servers and expensive storage -- or can someone make sense of the current state of commodity vs. BigIron for me? It definitely seems absurd that the most efficient way to buy CPU these days is 8-core servers when there's so many apps that only use about 1% of a core that we have to support. Without virtualization that becomes a huge waste. In order to utilize that CPU efficiently, you need to run many smaller images. Because of software bloat, you need big RAM servers now. Then when you look at the potentially bursty I/O needs of the server, you go with expensive storage arrays to get the IOPS and require fibre channel, and now that you have the I/O to drive the network, you need 4+ GigE drops per box. At the same time, throwing away all the 2006-vintage 2-core 16GB servers and replacing them with all this capex on BigIron seems like it isn't saving much money... Has anyone done a careful *independent* performance analysis of what their applications are actually doing (for a large web-services oriented company with ~100 different app farms or so) and looked at the different costing models and what performance you can get out of virtualization? _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
