Re: Running postgresql as a VMware ESx client

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Glen Eustace <geustace(at)godzone(dot)net(dot)nz> wrote:
>
>> Generally speaking, virtualization allows you to take a bunch of low
>> powered servers and make them live in one big box saving money on
>> electricity and management. Generally speaking, database sers are big
>> powerful boxes with lots of hard disks and gigs upon gigs of ram to
>> handle terabytes of data. Those two things seem at odds to me.
>
> If one is handling databases with Terabytes of data and 1000s of
> connections, I would agree. We will be looking at 100s of Megabytes max and
> possible several hundred connections. A much smaller workload.

Yeah, you're not really looking at heavy lifting here then. Should be fine.
>
>> What, exactly, as you looking to gain by running pgsql under vmware on
>> such hardware?
>
> Mobility, in the HA/DR sense. Being able to vmotion the server while it is
> running to rectify hardware issues or perform upgrades. To bring the server
> up at a DR site automagically using SRM. And yes, we have still to
> investigate the whole crash consistency stuff with SRM. This database is
> heavily biased toward reads rather than writes.

Given the light load you're looking at running, you'll likely be ok as
long as there aren't any issues with crash recovery.