[OpenAFS] calculating memory

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 15:24, Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 28 Jan 2011, at 20:24, Gary Gatling wrote:
>
>> I am in charge of several afs servers in our college. Right now there ar=
e
>> 5 afs servers running on 5 SPARC based servers. We are ditching Solaris
>> since it sucks so bad and are going to move to Linux VM's running inside=
 of
>> VMware.
>
> Firstly, I would be cautious about running I/O intensive services like
> fileservers within =A0a VM. You'll almost certainly get better performanc=
e
> from bare metal, especially if you end up sharing the same physical hardw=
are
> between multiple fileservers.

Second that.  However, depending on what one means by the
term VMware, it does not have to be horrendous.  VMware ESXi
*can* be configured to approach native speed with the appropriate
hardware (where appropriate *always* means "not cheap"(*)).
However, if one means the free VMware Server (or the Workstation
or Fusion offerings), then it is conceivable one might be better off
keeping the Solaris systems.....  As always, YMWV.

Gary

(*) I seem to recall that VMware did a demo setup that was
    capable of rather impressive I/O numbers.  I also think the
    list price of the equipment started somewhere around
    $250K (and as configured for the demo was probably
    higher).