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SATA drives typically come in larger capacities than SAS. Because of the
lower 7.2K RPM speeds for SATA versus 15K RPM for SAS, and because
SATA drives are designed for lower duty cycles, SAS is still the preferred drive
for production-level virtualization workloads. SATA, however, can be
appropriate for a multi-tiered archiving solution for less frequently used virtual
machines.
VMware HA
At the time of this writing, although ESX 3.5 Update 1 added support for
VMware HA feature, it had restrictions-—swap space must be enabled on
individual ESXi hosts, and only homogeneous (no mixing of ESX 3.5 and
ESXi hosts) HA clusters are supported. See VMware release notes for more
details:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx3i_e_35u1_vc25u1_rel_notes.html
Note: At the time of the writing, VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 was not supported
by IBM for multinode x3950 M2 with up to 64 processor cores. Although not
currently supported, VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 support from IBM is planned
for 2-node x3950 M2 (32-cores) in 2H/2008. VMware ESXi is not supported on
multinode x3950 M2 complexes.
2.6.2 Scaling Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Both Enterprise and Datacenter Editions of Windows Server 2003 x64 scale well
with support for 8 and 64 multi-core processors respectively
systems also support up to 2 TB of RAM and support the NUMA capabilities of
the IBM x3950 M2 multinode complex.
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions are NUMA-aware and
are able to assign application threads to use processor and memory resource
pools on local NUMA nodes. Scheduling application threads to run on local
resource pools can improve application performance because it minimizes
internode traffic on the x3950 M2 scalability ports and also reduces contention
for resources with other applications and potential resources bottlenecks by
assigning the different applications to run on different NUMA nodes.
For a detailed discussion of the features of Windows Server 2003 pertaining to
NUMA systems, see the Microsoft document Application Software
Considerations for NUMA-Based Systems, available from:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/numa_isv.mspx
Table 2-5 on page 74 lists features of the various Microsoft Server 2003 editions.
1
At the time of the writing, Windows Server 2003 was able to detect and use only up to 64 cores.
1
. These operating
Chapter 2. Product positioning
73
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