Loading Up on Virtual Servers
by Hu Yoshida on October 26, 2009
I visited a customer last week who was trying to run four 6 node ESX clusters with 200 to 240 instances per cluster on a large modular storage system. It was not surprising that the modular storage system could not support that workload. That type of workload needs to be run on a monolithic storage array that can scale up.
Since the reason for server virtualization is to consolidate servers to save costs, they did not want to run this on an expensive monlithic DMX. The only solution is to run this workload on a USP V with low cost modular storage virtualized behind it. The USP V has the multiprocessing capability that can scale up to support this load and scale out with lower cost external storage capacity. The USP V can also map the external storage into a Dynamic Provisioning pool, where the benfits of thin provisioning, wide stripe performance, and dynamic LUN provisioning can further reduce operational costs.
Loading up on virtual servers makes sense when you have the right storage to go with it. Modular storage systems, whether they are standalone or loosely coupled for scale out, can not support large virtual server workloads like this. This takes monolicthic storage systems that can scale up for performance and scale out with external storage for lower TCO.
