rbowman writes:
On 04/17/2015 12:20 PM, T wrote:


And you don't need a server when you have five or fewer workstations.

We do PSAP systems and they're big on redundancy, fault tolerance, and
all that good stuff so a couple of server class machines is unavoidable.
Lately virtual machines are all the rage. That might be fine is you are
doing CPU intensive stuff but disk and NIC virtualization sucks as far
as I can see.

On the larger servers, nic virtualization is quite good. Most modern
higher-end NIC's support the PCI Express Single Root I/O Virtualization
specification. This allows the hypervisor to grant guest direct access
to the NIC (without interfering with other guests or the hypervisor
itself) using virtual PCI Express functions.

There are NICs out there that will support 256 virtual functions
(allowing 256 guests direct access to the networking hardware).

Likewise, disk virtualization via FCOE or iSCSI over SR-IOV NIC's
works quite well. Again, on higher-end hardware, of course.

There is even one System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that provides 16 SATA
controllers, allowing direct access from up to 16 guests.