I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.
On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups. The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances. The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …
[Read more]