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BACKGROUND

We're considering building a virtual machine host to use for QA testing. Our primary goal is to be able to easily configure a set of virtual machines in a self-contained environment, that will simulate the main machines in our enterprise. We'll likely have a database machine, an app server, a web server, and one or two client machines within each environment.

We'd like to have between two and four environments active at any one time (i.e. up to twenty VMs simultaneously) with disk space for perhaps another 4 environments to be offline.

This is going to require a lot of horse power just for the basics. We're not going to be testing performance in these environments, it'll mostly be automated functional and integration testing, and possibly some manual testing performed by actual humans. The VMs don't need to behave like they have fast processors, but we would prefer to not have them bogged down by slow disk latency.

QUESTION

Given these goals, what do you think we should consider from a hardware standpoint? Is it worth splitting this over several 'smaller' machines rather than one honking great big one?

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4 Answers 4

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Memory will likely be your greatest restriction. Check out your virtual environment to see if it can share unused memory (ie. if you can allocate more than 100% of the available memory)

We have a hefty 8-core, 16Gbram host, and it will run about 20 VMs. I would think it would be more cost-effective, versatile and redundant to have 2 hosts half this size. With only 20 virtual machines however, anything beyond about 4 hosts would probably become difficult to manage.

If you want even more versatilty, locate the VMs on a SAN or other shared storage so that they can be run on either/any host.

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  • 20 VMs is pretty much what we're looking at. Could you please indicate which host software you're using (Virtual Server? VMWare? Hyper-V?) How many of those 20 guests are running at any one time? May 11, 2009 at 12:11
  • We're using VMWare Infrastructure (ESX), and can maintain 20 machines live on the one host - of course, it's a pretty beefy host.
    – Brent
    May 11, 2009 at 15:52
  • When doing only one host for QA you could consider looking at one machine like Brent's running ESXi(assuming you're looking for bottom dollar). ESX is a very nice platform though if you're allowed to spend money on this.
    – sclarson
    May 13, 2009 at 19:18
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Hard disk latency is going to be an issue, because each server is going to have a different access pattern, and it may hide synchronization errors because the disk is forcing everyone to go in a certain order (based on time the request was received), and slowly things down generally.

I would go for a striped mirrored array of very fast drives to limit your exposure to this problem. It'll still hide problems (notably certain race conditions) but not as much.

Load the server up with memory (16-32GB is not over-doing it), and go for an 8 core machine, or two four core machines with 8-16GB each.

-Adam

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  • Very good point about race conditions, I hadn't thought about that. May 11, 2009 at 12:15
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Have you considered using a blade chassis for this? All of our VMware systems at my company run in blade chassis which allows us a lot of flexibility and redundancy from a hardware standpoint. You can even have "hot-spare" blades, as well as the ability to add additional blades, or swap in more powerful blades at your leisure.

VMWare specifically, even has built in support for some advanced features in HP branded blade chassis.

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  • Actually, no; we hadn't considered blades. Good point. Thanks. May 15, 2009 at 12:09
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The virtualization mechanisms that I've worked with required static allocation of memory for the virtual hosts, so you'll probably need pretty hefty RAM in the servers.

Regarding fewer big honking machines vs. more not so honking machines, it's worth keeping in mind that in a virtualization context, the physical host is effectively a single point of failure for all the virtual hosts.

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  • We're not so worried about reliability in this case as these machines are intended to be used for testing, not running live services. May 11, 2009 at 12:13

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