Performance Question on possible implimentation

[DMarker]

We're working on putting a plan together to get into virtualization where I work. One of our problems is we're having problems finding current information on performance. We're looking at getting two new servers for HA/FT and two NAS boxes for redundant datastores. The question I have at the moment is how are production server VM's performing on NAS/NFS with 1GB connections? Presently we're planning on virtualizing four production servers onto one NFS datastore, but don't have any idea of how many more we could put on from there. Two of the servers are Groupwise POA's (email mailboxes), the third is a file/print server and the fourth is essentially an audio file repository that is written to frequently, but not played frequently. They're all Server 2003 boxes. Does anyone have any current recommendations or can provide information on what your current VM numbers are on NFS and how well it's running?

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the forums.

We're working on putting a plan together to get into virtualization where I work. One of our problems is we're having problems finding current information on performance. We're looking at getting two new servers for HA/FT and two NAS boxes for redundant datastores. The question I have at the moment is how are production server VM's performing on NAS/NFS with 1GB connections?

Use tools like perfmon to monitor your actual current storage usage. This will tell you exactly what your real loads are and then you can plan from there for how far the setup can scale.

>Presently we're planning on virtualizing four production servers onto one NFS datastore, but don't have any idea of how many more we could put on from there. Two of the servers are Groupwise POA's (email mailboxes), the third is a file/print server and the fourth is essentially an audio file repository that is written to frequently, but not played frequently. They're all Server 2003 boxes. Does anyone have any current recommendations or can provide information on what your current VM numbers are on NFS and how well it's running?

Generalizations will never be as good as the actual numbers from your actual gear. What more can you tell about the NAS device? How many spindles, what vendor, etc? Have you verified that the NAS is on the VMware HCL?

Good Luck!

[DMarker]

vmroyale,

Thanks for the hello and welcome.

Generalizations will never be as good as the actual numbers from your

actual gear. What more can you tell about the NAS device? How many

spindles, what vendor, etc? Have you verified that the NAS is on the VMware HCL?

We're presently looking at a couple of QNAP TS-859U-RP's. This could, however, change at the drop of a hat, as we're still in a very fluid stage. We're going to fill it with Western Digital RE4 2TB drives in a Raid 6.

I'll see what I can do with perfmon and get back on that in a bit.

[DMarker]

Sorry for such a long delay. I gathered read/write statistics on the four servers we're talking about starting with and totalled the max bytes per second from each of them. The total for the full day came out to just over 120mb per second.

That's way under a gig on 1gb ethernet and whatever 3gb/s or 6gb/s drives we would put in it, right? Is there anything else that I'm not considering that would come into play here? My coworker is having serious issues with the idea of trusting what we're calling critical servers (email and main file shares) on a NAS box, even with a redundant NAS for replication, and seems only confident in using a SAN.