> Generally speaking, virtualization allows you to take a bunch of low
> powered servers and make them live in one big box saving money on
> electricity and management. Generally speaking, database sers are big
> powerful boxes with lots of hard disks and gigs upon gigs of ram to
> handle terabytes of data. Those two things seem at odds to me.
If one is handling databases with Terabytes of data and 1000s of
connections, I would agree. We will be looking at 100s of Megabytes max
and possible several hundred connections. A much smaller workload.
> When I saw you post that the ESx servers would be dual quad core
> machines I immediately thought how nice that would be to run pgsql on,
> without vmware between it and the hardware.
To pilot this project we were going to run just the single VM on the
server, if there are performance issues we can always rebuild and put
the OS directly on the hardware rather than the ESx hypervisor.
> What, exactly, as you looking to gain by running pgsql under vmware on
> such hardware?
Mobility, in the HA/DR sense. Being able to vmotion the server while it
is running to rectify hardware issues or perform upgrades. To bring the
server up at a DR site automagically using SRM. And yes, we have still
to investigate the whole crash consistency stuff with SRM. This
database is heavily biased toward reads rather than writes.
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