Intel SSD x25-Extreme vs. OCZ Vertex 2 SATATII

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  1. Posts : 1,325
    Windows7 Ultimate 64bit
       #11

    jayhawker, what is your expected target hits of this web server? Having 18GB mem for just web/db serving is beyond overkill. My Apache/PHP/Postgresql running on an IBM X3650 (dual quad core) with 4GB mem, serving an image intensive website rarely use more than 700MB of memory... Most of the time it's idling with mem usage ~300MB.

    As for VMM, VMware ESXi 4 is good, or PROXMOX Linux, both are free...

    You need to understand this: High throughput servers are usually storage bottlenecked, but to use RAID 0 in server environment is rather "crazy", since it can fail - you don't want a server to fail (read again the emphasis of word "can"). Use either RAID 10/5/6, never use RAID 0 for ANYTHING except test servers where data is not important. In my setup, I run my X3650 accompanied by a SAN (self built), I offload the database tablespace and logs to the SAN.

    zzz2496
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 10
    Windows Web Server 2008 R2
    Thread Starter
       #12

    I am leaning towards running 2 Virtual servers, one for the Web App, and 1 for the session state, images, and sqlDatabase. Does that make sense, or would I see performance increases in having all of them in a differerent virtual server?
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  3. Posts : 1,325
    Windows7 Ultimate 64bit
       #13

    The point to get higher performance is not at virtual server partitioning, but rather to which RAID array is the DB server is using. Database workload is very random in nature, web server load is very static, if you use apache, you can install apache cache plugin so that apache won't read from disk when serving static pages. As for DB server, it's best for it to run the data portion at one RAID volume, and log portion at another RAID volume. Read anandtech.com they have discussed this in the past, they love enterprise class computing...

    Watch my words, which RAID array it's running on, meaning you'd need multiple RAID arrays to achieve the ultimate database serving speed.

    zzz2496
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 10
    Windows Web Server 2008 R2
    Thread Starter
       #14

    Thanks for the reply. Looked at your link. Like your taste. I use exactly the same cases for my Towers. Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free? Also, thinking about putting new SSD's in my development system and running Vmware on it as well. I have 3 older development machines that I keep going because they have old software on them that aren't compatible with my new Windows 7 machine. Would it make sense for me to run all of them on my new machine using VMWare, and can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?
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  5. Posts : 7,878
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64
       #15

    jayhawker said:
    Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free?
    Yes, it's 100% free. You can license it however to take advantage of the enterprise class features like DRS and Vmotion...but these items require shared storage, etc.

    Remember, ESXi is a hypervisor. It is it's own operating system. It's a scaled down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It may or may not work with your hardware, you will have to check the HCL (hardware compatibility list).

    jayhawker said:
    can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?
    Yes, you can copy the entire virtual hard drive file (VMDK). You can also perform snapshots within VMWare that you can resort back to. You can use backup software like Macrium or Acronis to make an image. You can even use a script directly on the ESXi box called ghettovcb.sh to copy a live running VM.
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 1,325
    Windows7 Ultimate 64bit
       #16

    jayhawker said:
    Thanks for the reply. Looked at your link. Like your taste. I use exactly the same cases for my Towers. Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free? Also, thinking about putting new SSD's in my development system and running Vmware on it as well. I have 3 older development machines that I keep going because they have old software on them that aren't compatible with my new Windows 7 machine. Would it make sense for me to run all of them on my new machine using VMWare, and can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?
    Pardon me, what link?
    pparks1 said:
    jayhawker said:
    Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free?
    Yes, it's 100% free. You can license it however to take advantage of the enterprise class features like DRS and Vmotion...but these items require shared storage, etc.

    Remember, ESXi is a hypervisor. It is it's own operating system. It's a scaled down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It may or may not work with your hardware, you will have to check the HCL (hardware compatibility list).

    jayhawker said:
    can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?
    Yes, you can copy the entire virtual hard drive file (VMDK). You can also perform snapshots within VMWare that you can resort back to. You can use backup software like Macrium or Acronis to make an image. You can even use a script directly on the ESXi box called ghettovcb.sh to copy a live running VM.
    Really? AFAIK VMware ESXi is a stand alone product made by VMware, it got nothing to do with Red Hat Enterprise, the hypervisor is VMware's custom hypervisor. VMware develops their own VMkernel, it's true that at first, Linux kernel is loaded, but after that, VMkernel took over...

    zzz2496
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 7,878
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64
       #17

    zzz2496 said:
    Really? AFAIK VMware ESXi is a stand alone product made by VMware, it got nothing to do with Red Hat Enterprise, the hypervisor is VMware's custom hypervisor. VMware develops their own VMkernel, it's true that at first, Linux kernel is loaded, but after that, VMkernel took over...
    Ooops...my bad. I was thinking of Open Filer which I have often used with VMWare ESXi to provide low cost shared storage space via iSCSI. Open Filer has some components from RHEL built into it.
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  8. Posts : 10
    Windows Web Server 2008 R2
    Thread Starter
       #18

    The link I was referring to was pparks1 at the bottom http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/b...1/DSC_1299.jpg

    Based on feedback, I have decided to go with one machine... a 2U rack with 8 hotswap drive bays, using the Intel S5520HRC mother board and X5650 processor. I am tossing around the possibility of going with less memory since it looks like I can get faster memory if I go with 6 MB or less. Any opinions on this? I am going to go with VMware, running Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on one virtual machine (VM1) with the web app (asp.net), and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on the other virtual machine (VM2) with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (or R2) as well as to hold the session state.

    On VM1 I am going to use two of my OCZ SSD's (one mirrored onto the other) out of my development machine that have fast read times but slow write times since the with the Web App I am only looking for high reads when the program is loading.

    The other Virtual Machine (VM2) will have 2 new 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 drives, again one mirrored onto the other (Raid 1) for the Database Server and Session State. Since the Vertex 2 Drives seem to have good IOPS, especially Random Writes, I hope to be fine with it. Since I am not using any striping, and am only mirroring, fault tolerance should be very easy to deal with. And since my U2 case allows for hot-swapping, if one fails, I should be able to just pop one out, and pop the other in hopefully.

    With my development machine, I am expecting to put 3 OCZ Vertex 2 100GB in a RAID 0, leaving 10% of the partition to deal with TRIM. Any opinions on this?

    Thanks
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 1,325
    Windows7 Ultimate 64bit
       #19

    Looks good to me :)
    I'd personally use a separate RAID array for the DB data, separating the DB server OS/app off the data and session/logs.

    RAID 1 is MUCH better than RAID 0 IMHO. In server world, you don't want to have a disastrous failure, much different than in desktop world... :)

    zzz2496
      My Computer


  10. Posts : 10
    Windows Web Server 2008 R2
    Thread Starter
       #20

    I expect to having separate Raid 1's for each virtual machine. I assume that in the BIOS I can setup two completely separate Raid 1's but haven't ever done it. Any thing I should konw.

    On my desktip machine, willl I have problems running 3 SSD's in a Raid 0. How will I align them, or do they even need it?
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