[Xen-users] MySQL Question: Host or Guest?

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I'm still putting the hardware together for the building of a xen based network 
I'd like to try out in the near future so haven't had much hands on time just 
yet. However, something did come to mind which I thought I would ask about.

Along the lines of having powerful web servers vs more distributed guests as 
web servers, I started thinking about MySql and here is the question.

Almost every part of what I do involves MySQL hosted applications. I am 
currently using IBM 8-way servers which have a healthy amount of memory. I 
started wondering, what if I took two of these machines, built xen on each, 
then set up at least one guest which was a MySQL server. This would allow me to 
repurpose the machines in that perhaps I could even take two more of those 
IBM's which are being used as web servers, and instead, put my web servers on 
the above two servers as guests.

So, in other words, I would take four of these IBM's, two running only MySQL, 
two running only as web servers, reconfigured as only two IBM's, each running 
one MySQL and one web server. Since the IBM's are so powerful, they serve up 
what they need to then sit idle until the next request.

As with another question I posted, I can't seem to wrap my head around this. 
Would doing this give me the same amount of power that I currently have using 
four IBM's or am I tasking the machines twice as much because of this. If it 
adds up to about the same thing, then it means no gain but I do save on power 
and hardware wear but that's all. If it does make a difference, then I could 
use the saved machines as say redundant xen environments once I get to that as 
second phase of testing. Of course, I can also add more bonded Ethernet 
connections on each IBM to make sure there is plenty of Ethernet I/O.

I realize that all of this is very much dependant on how busy the servers are 
as stand alone but they are overkill, meant to be as fast as possible, which is 
why things were set up this way. But, perhaps I can get the same with better 
redundancy through multiple xen servers instead.

Anyhow, just a question, trying to keep it simple, wondering if others have 
come to terms with this sort of thinking.

Mike


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