Friday Afternoon–hardware time

I spend far too much time in meetings these days.  But I try to keep my Friday afternoons free of meetings – and often use this time to update my various servers and try out new configurations.  Today it is time to rebuild some of my storage:

RAID

Specifically I am throwing a bunch of disks into one of my servers and setting up a storage space to play around with (you can learn more about spaces here: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-474T).

These days I find that the most common cause of performance issues in my virtualized environments is the storage subsystem.  So I try to build systems with as much parallelism in the storage as possible – as I will be running dozens of virtual machines at the same time and a single disk just will not cut it for performance.

Cheers,
Ben