back to article Server virtualisation is not enough

The server computing architecture that lies at the heart of what we now refer to as private cloud has been considered several times over. The game-changer – the capability that makes private cloud possible today – is virtualisation, which enables logical workloads to be fully abstracted from machines. The famous Moore’s Law …

COMMENTS

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  1. Virtual PC Guy

    IMHO - storage throughput is the silent killer of performance

    Disclosure: I work at MSFT on Hyper-V

    I spend a lot of time talking to people who are deploying virtualisation for private cloud solutions, and discussing the hardware requirements.

    For most people - the presence of modern multi-core processors means that CPU is rarely an issue. In fact, most people have significant excess CPU power even after they have moved to a virtualised environment.

    Memory can trip people up - but if you get it wrong it is fairly easy to identify - because VMs will fail to start with big error messages about there not being enough memory.

    But storage throughput is the silent performance killer.

    People go and put ~50 systems on a storage I/O system that is only twice as powerful as what they used to use for a single system - and then do not understand why performance is awful. There are really two problems here:

    1) We (I am using the royal we here and are referring to the makers of virtualisation software) do not alert users that performance issues may be caused by the fact that a given virtual machine seems to only be getting a measly 5mbit storage throughput (and I have seen numbers get that bad on poorly configured systems)

    2) System administrators / IT pros are just not used to thinking about the importance of storage bandwidth. For most systems today you just "get a good storage system" and do not take the time to actually think about it and size things out properly.

    Cheers,

    Ben

  2. Father Jed
    Paris Hilton

    Ask some one who has done it

    Seriously Reg - get some writers who actually know something with the technology they are talking about. This article is titled cloud but talks about virtualisation - just not the same thing at all.

    Actually - give Paris a call. She is beyond Mr Coates intelectual level.

    1. Canecutter

      The article IS on topic

      The article talks about _private_ clouds and what infrastructure is required to build a private cloud. It then asserts that virtualization alone is not sufficient. Thus the article has delivered as promised on the tin. What's your beef?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      title

      The article states that many companies resort to virtualisation for the provision private cloud services and goes on to talk about the major problems.

      Tangentially related.

  3. Bryan Jones
    IT Angle

    Cars don't travel on Eurostar

    Well they don't ...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coffee/keyboard

    Design is key

    I agree with the article about design. In my case I inhereted a patch work system split across 3 teams. Hardware was just added with no capacity planning. It is now very hard to change the architechture, designing everything from scratch seems to be the best way to do it.

  5. David Gale

    Come back MVS...

    Come back MVS all is forgiven.

    I don't doubt there will be yet another reinvention of the wheel, with a standards-based architecture to define the inter-relationships of various independently configurable server components.

    Plus ca change...

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