[OpenAFS] Deploying OpenAFS on VMs

[Russ Allbery]

Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> writes:

> We have been pretty confident that we could put the new AFS db servers
> up as virtual machines (each virtual DB server on a different physical
> machine, of course).

Oh, yeah, absolutely.  That shouldn't be any trouble at all.

> We've been thinking we could also put the AFS fileservers on different
> virtual machines, but maybe we should keep those on physical machines?
> We were expecting to put the /vicepX partitions on iSCSI disks, and had
> assumed that combination would provide pretty reasonable performance.

My guess is that as long as your iSCSI performance is reasonably good,
this shouldn't be a serious problem.  The question is whether the
virtualization overhead is going to add enough latency to the file system
performance that you'll start noticing.

I suspect there's no replacement for just benchmarking with as close to
your actual load pattern that you're worried about as you can.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>