[postgis-users] VMWare and PostGIS

[Paul Ramsey]

The most important thing is to figure out where your "fast enough" place
is, and not get too hung up on the "fastest" thing. If we wanted to be
fastest, we'd all drive Ducatis to work, but clearly fast enough works for
most of us.

The main problem with AWS is not the virtualization, it's the shared
tenancy. It's possible for other tenants to saturate the I/O at
unpredictable times, taking it from acceptable to non-existent, with no
predicability. This will be true, though to a lesser extent, with private
virtual environments, like shared VMWare hosts run by your IT department.
 ("To a lesser extent" because AWS storage is network mounted, so
everything the host does with I/O has to push out through a network pipe.
Your IT department VMWare host, on the other hand, will at least have
separate network and storage I/O channels.)

I have heard of, but never seen, VMWare hosts that attach directly to SAN
storage over iSCSI. So the host is virtual, but the storage is at full SAN
speed. A "best of both worlds" situation, but with the added cost of SAN
infrastructure.

P.


On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Stephen V. Mather <
svm at clevelandmetroparks.com> wrote:

>  Hi All,
> I should have asked this a long time ago regarding performance... .  So
> the classic storage solution (AFAIK) for a spatial database is RAID 10 for
> maximum read and write speed.  I have a RAID 10 running under a
> virtualization layer (VMWare in this case) and my sustained read speeds are
> in the 1Gbps range.  The hardware is oldish, but they are 10k SAS drives,
> so I would expect something a bit faster.
>         To the question-- I know virtualization makes a (not-so-good)
> difference in performance running spatial databases on e.g. Amazon EC2
> instances.  I assume this penalty is paid even for dedicated private
> clouds.  What is the consensus/experience with virtualization?  For my next
> machine, should I keep it to bare metal for the PostGIS portion?
>
>  Thanks in advance,
> Best,
> Steve
>
>   [image: http://sig.cmparks.net/cmp-ms-90x122.png] Stephen V. Mather
> GIS Manager
> (216) 635-3243 (Work)
> clevelandmetroparks.com <http://www.clemetparks.com>
>
>
>
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