John Madden schrieb: > FWIW, I won't run anything on hardware anymore unless I absolutely have > to. To me, the benefits of running virtualized outweigh the pitfalls -- > dealing with real OS installs on real hardware, dealing with > multipathing and SAN (virtual disks are easy), etc. Our Cyrus runs on Solaris with proper ZFS storage. This kind of storage is fast, reliable and supports many nodes per directory without a problem. Files check for backup is done in two hours for 50 million files (Tivoli Storage Manager Backup). We just can't virtualize this because in whatever "solution" the underlying block devices get virtualized again. The only solution we would have is to bind these storage devices (fc) exclusively on the virtualized guest systems. Problem remains: Solaris 10 is not well supported in VMware (no client tools and without them access remains _SLOW_) nor in Xen/Sun xVM. In the latter OpenSolaris (and Solaris 11) is the way to go (architecture i86xpv). Just to give a reason why sometimes it _IS_ necessary or better to have a real iron. Pascal -- Pascal Gienger University of Konstanz, IT Services Department ("Rechenzentrum") Electronic Communications and Web Services Building V, Room V404, Phone +49 7531 88 5048, Fax +49 7531 88 3739 ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html