[THIN] Re: Citrix - Harddisk Specification

The question is, is the pagefile being used that much? If so, then why?
Overall, it still isn't going to make a difference. With RAID 0 or 1 you
are going to be accessing two spindle on every read. Not so if they are
operating independently. You are limiting yourself to 1 read for the
pagefile and 1 read for the OS at any given time. And again, how many page
fault are you encountering? If it's that big of an issue, then it's time to
add more RAM.

Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf
Of Matt Kosht
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 1:28 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix - Harddisk Specification

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Joe Shonk <joe.shonk@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok... So it's fair to say that the Dell RAID Controllers have progressed
> since the NT 4.0 days? If you end up losing the RAID set who cares? It's
a
> terminal server. If Fault Tolerance isn't an issue, then I would argue
that
> RAID 0 will give you better performance over two independent spindles.
I would disagree. If your disk arms (both of them are predominantly
hitting the page file) you have created latency for other non-paging
disk activities. System may page faster but apps and other binaries
are waiting for disk time due to waiting on near constant paging
activity. It' probably hair splitting at this point dedicated spindle
for paging vs. just RAID0 but this config works well for me.

>
> It's not the form factor that causing the drives to fail, but the
excessive
> heat generated by blades/chassis. Not to mention vibrations.
>
> Performance Hit with SAN? Yes, this thread has been through this
argument.
> With the right system, it's even faster. 15k SAS drives are great, except
> when you factor in the crappy SAS controllers.
>
> SSD give great performance on reads, but not much of an advantage on
writes.
> It all depends on your workloads.
>
> As far as virtualization goes... Sure there is overhead. But can a single
> 32-bit Terminal server take advantage of a quad-core processor? Or more
> likely 8-cores in box? At the moment, the hardware has outpaced the
> operating system. Even with x64 system, how many users do you really want
> to pack on single OS instance?

Correct. I am actually talking (4) 32 bit TS/XE servers on 1 physical
blade (using a bare metal hypervisor like Hyper-V) as it will be able
to actually use all of that horsepower. x64 breaks some of our apps,
so for now it's out of the picture. If you have the resources why not
use it?
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