Generally speaking, virtualization allows you to take a bunch of low powered servers and make them live in one big box saving money on electricity and management. Generally speaking, database sers are big powerful boxes with lots of hard disks and gigs upon gigs of ram to handle terabytes of data. Those two things seem at odds to me.
If one is handling databases with Terabytes of data and 1000s of connections, I would agree. We will be looking at 100s of Megabytes max and possible several hundred connections. A much smaller workload.
When I saw you post that the ESx servers would be dual quad core machines I immediately thought how nice that would be to run pgsql on, without vmware between it and the hardware.
To pilot this project we were going to run just the single VM on the server, if there are performance issues we can always rebuild and put the OS directly on the hardware rather than the ESx hypervisor.
What, exactly, as you looking to gain by running pgsql under vmware on such hardware?
Mobility, in the HA/DR sense. Being able to vmotion the server while it is running to rectify hardware issues or perform upgrades. To bring the server up at a DR site automagically using SRM. And yes, we have still to investigate the whole crash consistency stuff with SRM. This database is heavily biased toward reads rather than writes.
-- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Glen and Rosanne Eustace GodZone Internet Services, a division of AGRE Enterprises Ltd. P.O. Box 8020, Palmerston North, New Zealand 4446. Ph: +64 6 357 8168, Fax +64 6 357 8165, Mob: +64 21 424 015 http://www.godzone.net.nz "A Ministry specialising in providing low-cost Internet Services to NZ Christian Churches, Ministries and Organisations." -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
