[geeks] Looking for options to increase IOPS (Storage)

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

J. Alexander Jacocks wrote:
> I've run into something of a dilemma, when it comes to storage.  I'm
> doing a bunch of consulting work that requires me to test large number
> of virtual machines, on a variety of OSes and installed software.  I
> have a reasonable server for the virtualization (dual Xeon 2.8gHz
> 8-core, 10gb RAM), but I need to increase the speed of the disks that
> the VMs sit on.  I have plenty of capacity (4x1tb disks, in RAID5),
> but insufficient speed to run more than 8 simultaneous VMs.
> 

RAID5 = write hole; run 2x RAID1 instead perhaps?

Also what virtualization software are you running?  You might find
adding a nice 256MB or 512MB caching SATA controller would do what you
need, probably the VMs are bursty rather than sustained reads and writes.

--Patrick