Paul Manning, from VMware, in response to a question I asked in the VI:OPS forums:
The current best practice for NFS is to not seperate the VM swap space from the VMhome directory on a NFS datastore. The reason for the originial recommendation was just good old fashioned conservitiveness.
More at the forum post, including more on [...]
Your Usable Capacity May Vary - Chuck conducts a thought deployment comparing EMC, HP and NetApp usable space for a 120 disk Exchange deployment. And while he glosses over a couple perhaps non-minor issues (RAID-5 vs RAID-DP and whether EMC’s snapshots are adequately performant), he does hit one of NetApp’s weak spots dead on: [...]
Performance Report: Multiprotocol Performance Test of VMware® ESX 3.5 on NetApp Storage Systems: A complementary whitepaper to VMware’s own work comparing Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS as storage protocols for VMware ESX. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008 - Amazon’s post-mortem on the 7/20 S3 outage. Excerpt: “We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message [...]
VM HA - service console networking, isolation behavior - and other “under the covers stuff” - An overview of how VMware ESX’s High Availability works under the hood - making it much more apparent to me how important file locking is to HA’s functioning. (I’d love to see an overview of how file locking [...]
Red Hat adopts KVM: what happens to Xen now? - I work in a VMware ESX shop right now (other than all those Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails and OpenVZ VEs, that is) - no Xen or KVM. However, given the serious pain in the butt that timekeeping is in Linux guests on ESX, [...]
VMware has just released a paper entitled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance (seen at Scale the Mind and blog.scottlowe.org); maybe this will help deflate some of the too-often repeated speculation that NFS is too slow for VMware ESX.