[quote=“nathan”]What are your requirements? Have you looked at our benchmarks?
If you have really beefy requirements on monster servers, I’d go with VMWare ESXi and take advantage of VMotion. That said, our system requirements aren’t that great, so you may have free resources yet. Also, if you have extra computing resources, my opinion is that you’ll get the most “bang for your buck” by separating the SQL database machine and host it on your most powerful machine - just make sure that you have a fast connection between your servers. It’s cheap these days to set up a dedicated switch gig-E network (VLAN or otherwise)[/quote]
Just to start this post off, you know way more about this stuff then I do Nathan.
Ok, to start things off, we are currently building a mini data cetner, with 6 servers. We have 2 machines dedicated to FPMI/FSQL/OPC, and 2 bigger machine running circular replicated MySQL(come on continuent, I need to cluster that. Should launch tommorow!!). We also have 2 machines running ESXi for various other server needs. That said, if ESXi was out 6 months ago, we would have only 2 beefy machines, as I am quite impressed with ESX/i. And if you have the money, Vmotion and storage Vmotion could be a life saver. However, to do this, you need some sort of SAN. We have a Dell MD3000i iSCSI SAN, and it is awesome. We bought it 6 months ago, and we have 6 750gb SATA drives and 4 300 Gb SAS drives. The SATA drives serve our DB (more spindles, although SAS is faster on spindle to spindle tests) and the SAS drives serve our ESXi machines. Now we are not live yet, but when I can get a copy, I will test xVM and let you know how it compares.
On a side note, I got an email today saying Sun xVM Server should be released in coming weeks.