Re: R: Accessing a Filer Root Volume from Windows with only NFS Licensed

You REALLY don’t want any kind of swap/temp/paging file on a volume you’re going to snapshot, since the data changes often and is useless from a recovery point of view. So you want that on a different volume anyway. If it’s ESX swap you’re referring to, I agree with Brent, put it on local disk, that way it has a dedicated 100MB/s (or whatever your local drives can write/read at) channel- if you’re using swap you’re going to slow down anyway, so you’ll want to reduce contention for that.

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Brent Wilkinson
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 4:14 PM
To: Page, Jeremy; Hadrian Baron; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual disk layout

If your ESX hosts have local disk, create VMFS partition and put them there. ( this is actually a suggestion in the 3.5 install guide)

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Page, Jeremy
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 10:46 AM
To: Hadrian Baron; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual disk layout

I’m not concerned with making them faster, I just don’t see any reason for snapping a TB or so of swap files offsite.

Jeremy M. Page____________________

Systems Architect

* email:Jeremy.Page@gilbarco.com - ( phone: 336.547.5399 - 6 fax: 336.547.5163 - ( cell: 336.601.7274

From: Hadrian Baron [mailto:Hadrian.Baron@vegas.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 12:44 PM
To: Page, Jeremy; Toasters
Subject: RE: Mulling over virtual disk layout

“1) The swap wants reasonably fast disk”

With 500 vms I’d hope you have a decent amount of spindles to play with (it is certainly justified), if the swap needs to be really fast why not carve a dedicated aggregate for them and FC attach them. I don’t see how putting the swap luns in a different volume on the same aggregate will make the swap any faster, other than removing ASIS from the equation.

- Hadrian

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Page, Jeremy
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 5:04 AM
To: Toasters
Subject: Mulling over virtual disk layout

We are in the preliminary stages of moving our 500 VM system to NFS (from fibre). The goal is to SnapVault everything off site, and I’d like to use A-SIS on our production volumes if at all possible (our VMs are almost identical and 95% reads so this should give us a great level of compression). My question to you is this:

Should I put the swap file on a different VMDK and put that in a different volume? The reasoning behind this is that 1) The swap wants reasonably fast disk and 2) I think that the swap file will not “play nicely” with A-SIS, at least not as nicely as normal data and 3) There is no need to actually waste bandwidth snapping the swap file offsite since it’s not needed to recover the machines (as long as in a DR standpoint we create the drive that contained the swap windows will create it at boot).

Thoughts or experiences welcome.

Jeremy M. Page____________________

Systems Architect

* email:Jeremy.Page@gilbarco.com - ( phone: 336.547.5399 - 6 fax: 336.547.5163 - ( cell: 336.601.7274

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