We got a couple of new servers at Solfo recently which showed me one of the
reasons virtualization is so popular now: Servers are too fast!
The "standard issue" CPU is now a quad-2.5GHz CPU, so in each
server we have 20 GHZ CPU and 32GB ram (at less than $50
per gigabyte it's too cheap to not just fill it up and be done
upgrading). Just a few years ago the CPUs we were getting were
"only" dual 2GHz, for ~8GHz CPU per box. That's a big increase!
In each "tier" of the application (app servers, db servers,
search servers) our main reason for having more than one or two
servers is redundancy / high availability - never lack of CPU and
rarely because we need more memory.
Here's from one of our webservers (virtualized with Xen with 6 of
the 8 CPUs on the "real" hardware).
The big exception is the MySQL servers where we get constrained
by I/O so we need a single …
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