RE: [Xen-users] storage question

Gary W. Smith
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:20:17 -0000

They have multiple hosts.  The problem is they are trying to do it on the cheap
with a mid to low end NetGear appliance.  We have done it in the past with some
very beefy NFS servers but their problem is for them beefy = money, which they
don''t want to spend.

We have another one of these NFS servers that we do the backups to (rysnc) and
the performance is such that we can''t have more than two servers
backing up to it as the same time.  So I doubt putting a dozen VM servers (or
even Xen servers for that matter) will do very well.  We are seeing about
20MB/sec throughput.

Anyway, thanks for the links.  I will review them and see what I can do to come
up with a compelling argument to get something better.

________________________________

From: xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com on behalf of Fajar A. Nugraha
Sent: Fri 1/30/2009 12:03 AM
To: Gary W. Smith
Cc: xen-users@lists.xensource.com
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] storage question



On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Gary W. Smith <gary@primeexalia.com>
wrote:
> I have some contract work with a client that is running Ubuntu under
> CentOS under VMWare.  This is all on a local box.  Why no xen, well, I
> don''t have an answer for that.  For some reason the client would
like us
> to move their disk based VM instances to a NetGear 1000 NFS server.

Maybe they read this
http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html
http://viroptics.pancamo.com/2007/11/why-vmware-over-netapp-nfs.html

> Okay, when you are done laughing, does anyone have a consolidated list
> of why this is bad.  I would like to give them more reasons that I
> already have on why this is bad.

I can only think of two :
- performance. Local disk i/o thorughput should be higher than NFS
provided the same disk and VM load.
- nfs can provide simplicity when you have many host servers. From
what you describe, I get the idea that it''s only one.

Regards,

Fajar