Bernd Fehling <bernd.fehl...@uni-bielefeld.de> wrote: > unfortunately we have to run VMs, otherwise we would waste hardware. > I thought other solr users are in the same situation but seams that > other users have tons of hardware available and we are the only one > having to use VMs.
We have ~5 smaller (< 1M documents) solr setups that runs under VMWare (chosen because that is what Operations use for all their virtualization). We have a single and quite large setup (terabytes of data, billions of documents) that runs alone on dedicated hardware. Then we have the third solution: Multiple independent Solr oriented projects that share the same bare metal. CentOS everywhere BTW. We would probably get better hardware utilization by running the hardware sharing setups in a virtualization system, together with some random other projects. But I doubt we would gain much for the cost of rocking the high-performance boat. We do have some other bare-metal setups than Solr at our organization (State and University Library, Denmark), but the default for most other projects is to use virtualizations. Going mostly bare metal with Solr was an explicit and performance-driven decision. Except for the virtualized instances, we only use local SSDs to hold our index data. That might affect the trade-off as even slight delays in IO becomes visible, when storage access times are < 0.1ms instead of > 1ms. I suspect the relative impact of virtualization is less with spinning drives or networked storage. - Toke Eskildsen
