Hello! I would ask the community if my idea to utilize openvz is reasonable. We have several modern fileserver, all equiped with a fast disk subsystem and dual gig ethernet (but only one used) the problem is that the disk subsystem is slowed down by the nic. so we think it would be nice to utilize the second nic. bonding is no option because, because the network guys don't like it and seems to cause a lot of trouble in complex network setups. routing also don't work because all clients come from the same subnet. my idea. i divide the machine in two vps, and assign each vps exclusivly disk space and one nic/ip. first i consider to use xen, but i don't think that the performance is sufficient. regards
Hi, if I understand your situation correctly, a single network interface is limiting the performance of your server. Does this mean that your network traffic is nearly 1Gbit/sec? Dependant on your application, this is rarely the case. Disk io/ram/CPU is the bottleneck of most servers well before the network transfer rate limitation. ie, to process/generate the average number of packets which make up ~1Gbit/sec, the cpu power would be immense. I would say multiple network cards are advantagous only when connecting distinct networks (acting as router,bridge) or when achieving redundant connectivity to a single network. Rick
This is the rare case. we use for the disk system 16 port areca pci-e controller. dual opteron machines with 4gb mem. the service on the machines is a distributed caching system for our tape library. at the moment we get 80mb/s from the machines (depending how many concurrent request). we also thought about 10ge but this is to expensive. regards
can you monitor your system and tell how much is underutilized CPU and disk? for example, run `vmstat 1` for some time.