NEWS FLASH! It blows my mind that in 2015 I am still having conversations where the statement, “My workload is WAY TOO HEAVY for virtualisation” makes an appearance. Any Infrastructure Architect that utters these words should be fired. Monster VMs have been industry accepted for more than 4 years now.
Many vendors have teams of experts that specialise in virtualising mission-critical and business-critical services. There are loads of resources available on said subject:
- VMworld 2013: Software-Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Utilisation, High Performance Workloads
- VMworld 2013: Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines
- VMware White Paper: Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications on vSphere
- VMware Blog: VROOM! Blog from the VMware Performance Team
- Book: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms by Emad Benjamin
- Book: Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right by Michael Corey, Jeff Szastack and Michael Webster
- Book: Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere by Kannan Mani and Don Sullivan
- Blog: Longwhiteclouds.com
My advice to naysayers and non-believers:
- Educate yourself with the resources above
- Ask your favourite hardware vendor to deliver their all-flash/4 socket CI/HCI hardware to your lab (3 or 4 hosts) as a PoC/Demo
- Also ask for the services of their Performance and Optimisation Team to assist you
- Load your heaviest configuration into that environment as Monster VMs
- Go through all of your operational, performance and failure scenarios
- Test it, hammer it and try to break it
- Make an informed decision based upon fact, not FUD
- What have you got to lose?
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