Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Learning to Live with Virtualization

Comment at ArsTechnica:
"One of the big things that I've learned and that's been recently reinforced for me, is that you need a whole mindset change about how you build servers, how you evaluate what goes into your standard builds, how you monitor...

Think, for example, about a daemon that wakes up once an hour to check on something (it doesn't matter what...). Once an hour's not much, right? Except you have 100 guests, so that's once every 36 seconds, on average. Still sound like a lightweight process? Still need to be in your standard build? Likewise a daemon that eats 100 MB of RAM, or blindly installing packages because you "might need to use gcc some time". Yeah, maybe you might. Is it worth the storage you just ate?"

Couldn't agree more; especially the part about different monitoring requirements for VMMs.

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