On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Jan-Ivar Mellingen <jan-ivar.mellingen@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Regarding 'pulling the plug' on the servers: Physical or virtual, always use > a UPS. You can pull the plug as much as you like. When the power is about to > run out it signals the server, which shuts down cleanly. > Our servers have dual powersupplies, connected to separate UPS'es on > separate power sources... I've watched three redundant UPSes, three redundant power conditioners, and the switch for the diesel generator all fry when the perfect storm of events happened in a job 7 or 8 years ago. Every single machine in the hosting center lost power. Of the hundred or so database servers, mine was the only one that came up. The others all had to rely on off site backups to get up and running. Not one other DBA at that company had performed a power failure test. > In a nutshell, I am heartly recommending virtualization. In a nutshell, you are relying on luck that both heavy iron machines can't lose power at the same time. Sure, it's a low possibility, but it's still a real one. > And - I do not want to start a discussion about it. Just sharing my opinion. Well, you can't throw the post you threw out there and not expect it to start a discussion really. I understand a lot of the reasoning for virtualization. My DB servers run at 75 to 100% capacity during midday, there'd be no real advantage to buying an eve bigger piece of iron to run them on. I see the advantages of virtualization for certain load types, and allowing to easily move services as a single disk image instead of installing the service and configuring it on a new machine. Where I work all the servers (except the nagios box) work hard and there'd be no real advantage to me in putting all my eggs in the virtualization basket there. I do use KVM to run multiple servers on my laptop for testing. It's great for that. But hope is not a method I use when installing my servers. -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin
