Re: [Xen-users] Windows DomU with SSDs

[James Harper <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> We are thinking of venturing into the world of hosting Windows DomUs on
> our Xen infrastructure. As Windows generally requires a lot more IOPS than
> Linux does, we are trying to do everything we can to improve performance.
> 
> While using SSDs would solve the IOPS problem, SSDs suffer from limited
> write cycles. So, we have the idea of using Flashcache from Facebook to use
> a single SSD as a cache in write-through mode, along with spindle drives in
> RAID10.
> 
> My questions to the community are:
> 
> 1) What are the general views of using SSDs in a Xen environment? All of our
> guests are "untrusted". Is this just generally a bad idea?
> 
> 2) Does anyone have any experience of using Flashcache? Are there any
> potential issues that someone has come across?
> 

Bcache (http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ ) is another project that does the 
same sort of thing as flashcache. Someone has put together some benchmarks 
comparing the two, although obviously they might not reflect your workloads...

http://www.accelcloud.com/2012/04/18/linux-flashcache-and-bcache-performance-testing/

James


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