Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
Is it a good idea to use an SSD for virtualization? Possibly 4 operating systems. I am thinking it might wear out faster.
SSDs & Virtualization
- Thread starter Bozo
- Start date
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
I don't see any reason why not.
ddrueding
Fixture
It is a really good idea in my opinion. Running independant physical servers usually leads to tons of underutilized hardware. Going Virtual allows you to minimize waste. But it also means that bottlenecks in the hardware will become an actual issue. HDD IO is a significant bottleneck, particularly if the VMs are interacting in some way (therefore both being accessed at the same time). Before SSDs, I would put one VM per HDD. They could share RAM and CPU easy enough, but HDD drive lights never went out.
SSDs allow all that IO without issue. No problems, no crashes, no weirdness, no special optimizations.
SSDs allow all that IO without issue. No problems, no crashes, no weirdness, no special optimizations.
I don't have access to SSDs at work but we try to achieve roughly the same by spreading the workload out among lots of different LUNs so that storage IO isn't the bottleneck just like you described.
ddrueding
Fixture
Indeed. That is a very expensive way to do it. SSDs are a great deal if you are measuring in IOPS.
I need shared datastore access in my setup so it's more costly from the start and consumer grade drives can't be used here (unfortunately). The arrays can fit SSDs but the company deems them too costly for engineering purposes so we split up the IO. The typical config is 600GB 10K RPM SAS drives in RAID 10.