VMware for Cyrus?

[Pascal Gienger]

John Madden schrieb:
> FWIW, I won't run anything on hardware anymore unless I absolutely have 
> to.  To me, the benefits of running virtualized outweigh the pitfalls -- 
> dealing with real OS installs on real hardware, dealing with 
> multipathing and SAN (virtual disks are easy), etc.

Our Cyrus runs on Solaris with proper ZFS storage. This kind of storage 
is fast, reliable and supports many nodes per directory without a 
problem. Files check for backup is done in two hours for 50 million 
files (Tivoli Storage Manager Backup).

We just can't virtualize this because in whatever "solution" the 
underlying block devices get virtualized again. The only solution we 
would have is to bind these storage devices (fc) exclusively on the 
virtualized guest systems. Problem remains: Solaris 10 is not well 
supported in VMware (no client tools and without them access remains 
_SLOW_) nor in Xen/Sun xVM. In the latter OpenSolaris (and Solaris 11) 
is the way to go (architecture i86xpv).

Just to give a reason why sometimes it _IS_ necessary or better to have 
a real iron.

Pascal
-- 
Pascal Gienger
University of Konstanz, IT Services Department ("Rechenzentrum")
Electronic Communications and Web Services
Building V, Room V404, Phone +49 7531 88 5048, Fax +49 7531 88 3739