Comments on: ⇥ Going virtual

By: Stuart Herbert

Stuart Herbert — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:30:32 +0000

Your workload must be very low on I/O if VMWare Server is sufficient for your needs

A tip if you ever think of moving to ESX (or vSphere as it has been renamed) … if you can’t afford a NetApp to go with your vSphere deployment, you can’t afford vSphere. Learned that one the hard way, sadly.

Best regards,
Stu

By: Marco Tabini

Marco Tabini — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:19:36 +0000

@gasper I think that virtualization on that scale works best where you have multiple machines that share an uneven load—precisely so that, when one box loads more than the others, the virtual machine can allocate more resources to it. If the machines all require significant resources, then virtualization is probably not going to help.

By: gasper_k

gasper_k — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:54:41 +0000

It does however comes with a price; we have many virtualized servers in our company and these virtual machines start eating each others’ resources, namely CPU and network. For example, we’ve noticed that when one virtual server does large data transfers, some other on the same host (web server) can’t handle as much requests as it can when no transfers are in progress. This is all quite obvious when you think about it, but it can be surprising how much it affects the performance. We’re planning to put some of the servers out of virtualization again.

By: Harro

Harro — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:08:19 +0000

We’re going through the same at my work.

We’re trying to move everything to Amazon, currently one or two websites are running on it and we sometimes use the cloud for stress testing out ticketing system. bringing 200 machines up at once do a 30 minute stresstest and take them all down again.. You can’t do that with normal servers