Chapter 2. Product positioning 73SATA drives typically come in larger capacities than SAS. Because of thelower 7.2K RPM speeds for SATA versus 15K RPM for SAS, and becauseSATA drives are designed for lower duty cycles, SAS is still the preferred drivefor production-level virtualization workloads. SATA, however, can beappropriate for a multi-tiered archiving solution for less frequently used virtualmachines. VMware HAAt the time of this writing, although ESX 3.5 Update 1 added support forVMware HA feature, it had restrictions-—swap space must be enabled onindividual ESXi hosts, and only homogeneous (no mixing of ESX 3.5 andESXi hosts) HA clusters are supported. See VMware release notes for moredetails:http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx3i_e_35u1_vc25u1_rel_notes.html2.6.2 Scaling Microsoft Windows Server 2003Both Enterprise and Datacenter Editions of Windows Server 2003 x64 scale wellwith support for 8 and 64 multi-core processors respectively1 . These operatingsystems also support up to 2 TB of RAM and support the NUMA capabilities ofthe IBM x3950 M2 multinode complex.Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions are NUMA-aware andare able to assign application threads to use processor and memory resourcepools on local NUMA nodes. Scheduling application threads to run on localresource pools can improve application performance because it minimizesinternode traffic on the x3950 M2 scalability ports and also reduces contentionfor resources with other applications and potential resources bottlenecks byassigning the different applications to run on different NUMA nodes.For a detailed discussion of the features of Windows Server 2003 pertaining toNUMA systems, see the Microsoft document Application SoftwareConsiderations for NUMA-Based Systems, available from:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/numa_isv.mspxTable 2-5 on page 74 lists features of the various Microsoft Server 2003 editions.Note: At the time of the writing, VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 was not supportedby IBM for multinode x3950 M2 with up to 64 processor cores. Although notcurrently supported, VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 support from IBM is plannedfor 2-node x3950 M2 (32-cores) in 2H/2008. VMware ESXi is not supported onmultinode x3950 M2 complexes.1 At the time of the writing, Windows Server 2003 was able to detect and use only up to 64 cores.
