[OpenAFS] Running OpenAFS in Vmware ESX host

[Matthew Cocker]

Neulinger, Nathan wrote:

> It only obliterates it if you have ONE vmware system. 
> 
> We are doing this for our afs database servers and have 10 DELL 2650's
> virtualizing approximately 100 linux and windows servers, with plenty of
> room to spare.
> 
> -- Nathan
> 
Are you using vmotion. ESX (if the vm images are stored on sans) has the 
ability to migrate vms from one vm server to another with out taking the 
vm down. Also if any esx server goes down the other can instantly bring 
up all the vms it was running. Lastly on one modern box our afs servers 
are using hardly using any cpu or memory, but when the FS crashes it 
takes out a lot of users and takes ages to come up.

Also fibre channel switches are real expensive, so with ESX we can slipt 
the modern server into several virtual afs fs instance with less users 
each (better slavage times), better use the hardware and SANs 
connections (of which we need less). All very promising. It also allows 
us to have identical dev/test/production environments and means that the 
  dependence on a particular version of linux to run X hba on X hardware 
is removed.

If only it did not cost so much.


Nathan, did you put vicepX on raw disk or on a vmfs shared lun?

Cheers

Matt