Solid State Drives (SSDs) on ESX Hosts

[ekisner]

We're running some HP Proliant DL380 G5 servers, and I'm wondering if anyone has any experiance with using SSDs on their ESX hosts. Particularly, we're looking for 2.5" SAS drives.

The SSDs would contain the ESX installation only... all VMs and related storage resides on a SAN.

Since most of the I/O on an ESX host has (in my somewhat limited experiance) been mostly reads, with the odd write (for logs and such), an SSD would make sense to me as something which would not fail any time soon due to too many writes to a sector.

And since they're becoming more and more mainstream, I'm starting to wonder if they're a reliable / supportable hardware option.

[dilidolo · Accepted solution]

We have them in our IBM blades and I believe they are Intel SLC. Runs well.

[ekisner]

Cool

I'm gonna talk to some of our account reps and see what kind of pricing I can get.. will be interested in comparing benchmarks

[Rumple]

IBM gear does not use the Intel SSD technology...they aligned themselves with Hitachi and partners...

[ChrisMTL]

I run them on 4 HS21 blades and they work great !

below is a c/p from the ibm site.

"IBM is offering next-generation local storage today with new SATA-based solid state drives. Offering more than double the reliability of conventional hard drives these slim drives are available either in a single or double configuration for additional RAIDed data security. Ideal for local OS booting, solid state drives are a viable alternative to mechanical hard drives for simple applications or an important next step toward external shared storage with end-to-end reliability."

Chris

[K-MaC]

On the topic of SSD's Microsoft Research just released a paper saying its not worth it at this point. Thought some here might like to read it.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1519065.1519081

Cheers

Kevin

[Rumple]

Of course they did...Vista performance with SSD has been absolutely abysmal that's directly related to the operating system and how it reads and writes data...

They are going to try to stave off that technology as long as possible until they figure out how to use it...

[mudha]

Does anyone give weblink where VMware says that SSD ares upported in 3.5