Physical Disk Failures

[Eric12]

For the past few months I have had multiple physical disk failures on one of my VMware servers.

So now the question that comes to mind is that with virtualization will I see more physical disk failures than let's say a normal file server?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

--Eric

[admin]

No more, no less.

Hardware is hardware.

If you use cheap, old, non-enterprise hardware you may have more failures.

Virtualization has no affect.

[jurajfox]

Well potentially there will be much more I/O going to the drives when they host multiple VMs instead of just one physical machine. The IOPS on our SAN are generally much higher in VMFS volumes then generic volumes. This may affect certain types of drives (eg SATA) in terms of reliability. However, it's pretty hard to quantify this in any accurate way.

Message was edited by:

jurajfox

[RDPetruska]

In general, virtualization software is going to push ALL of your hardware harder (that's kind of the point - more utilization of your computing resources). So, you most likely will see hardware failures quicker, as the components are stressed more.

[Paul_B1]

In general, virtualization software is going to push

ALL of your hardware harder (that's kind of the point

- more utilization of your computing resources). So,

you most likely will see hardware failures quicker,

as the components are stressed more.

I would agree with this and it makes sense.

To Brian's point, there have been some recent studies that show the Mean Time To Failure isn't significantly different between "Enterprise" hard drives and "Non-Enterprise" drives.

Here's a good overview on the subject, with links to various papers and research:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2099742,00.asp