Virtualization and the ISP (part 3.1)

Time for some power measurements!

ESXi was the hypervisor involved in the tests.

System installed, 4 virtuals powered on, but not doing anything: 2.2A @115V

System installed, 4 virtuals being installed hitting the I/O system: 2.4A @115V

System installed, 4 virtuals pushing 100% CPU each, no tuning: 2.6A @115V

While the virtuals were pushing the high CPU load, they were also hitting the disk I/O system as well, though not nearly as hard as 4 concurrent installs occuring.

Part 3.2 will continue with real life power measurements of the systems these PE2900s would replace so that I can do a comparison based on idle vs full load against current production systems (mix of idle and load).

Part 3.3 will have information as I cut over a couple of the clustered systems onto the PE2900 virtualized servers starting with one of the web servers and a POP/IMAP server, continuing from there to a couple of the SMTP servers.  I’ll be able to report back subjective performance reactions as well as some actual measured data via different utilities.

While this is happening, I am working on learning how to make my own ‘appliances’ for faster configuration and turn-up of the different servers I’d like to deploy.  It has been kind of boring so far, but maybe I’ll get’er all figured out.

Until next time…