Virtualization on SAN

[nike]

Hello Guys,

Do you guys run vurtualization on SAN or in local disk? If anyone running in SAN, please share your experience.

[whcdavid]

yes, you should be able to do. Please check this link.

SAN Virtualization Guidelines (http://www.storage-virtualization.com/sanvirt.htm)

[BrandonP]

Recently we have been seeing many customers discouraged with their Virtualization product and ultimately have returned to COLOTRAQ asking for us to source a dedicated server/managed platform. From multiple diagnosis I have learned that CPU-hungry/labor intensive applications do not do well on Virtualization platforms. Virtualization has been proven effective for simple web apps, hosting multiple web sites, and simple data manipulation. However our clients that have been sold on virtualization and have deployed their MySQL, Oracle, Pinnacle, SQL Server, etc. applications have come back with major bottleneck issues.

Long story short, the bottleneck almost always points to the shared SAN. Read-Write speeds on a shared SAN have speed and also latency issues when multiple clients are accessing the space. Hence the CPU cycles are held up, making for a crash and/or a terrible user experience. The remedy has been migrating the storage to a NAS over fibre channel, or simply going to completely managed solution. This of course increases the cost significantly and at the end of the day defeats the cost effectiveness of virtualization.

There are many studies trying to isolate virtualization problems. Check out YouTube - Shouting in the Datacenter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4&feature=player_embedded)

Has anyone else had this experience?

I'd like to know your opinion; Is this because virtualization is a fairly new product for data center vendors or is it because salesfolk are just too anxious to push this product and are in return not selling the correct, fitting solution?