[Xen-users] How would you burn up 20GB of fiber on a Xen farm?

[Tim Post <tim.post@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello to all. 

I'm setting up a high capacity farm that's going to allow many
departments of a company or project have their own resources.

I have little to no control over the brand of CPU (I would have much
preferred AMD) and name brand of the gear, but I do get some input on
what goes in each node.

They are dell Power Edge 2950's, found here :

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_2950?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Went with 2x quad core xeons, 32 GB ram per node.

I'm stuffing them full of large 10k SAS drives (probably 300 GB), and
getting the optional 2x 10GB optical ethernet adapters.

I have 2x 24 port Extreme optical switches (managed), so I'm really
debating on what I'm going to do with all of this bandwidth.

Using the switches, I can effectively run 2 independent 4GB networks for
AoE + a 2G network for private ip networks (all x2) , or

I can use a full 10G as a shared pipe for AoE and vlan off the second
one for many private IP networks, or

.. any combination of the above. 

Each server will have 12 10/100/1000 nics. To compound it, I have a
choice of one of 3 blends that can be sent to each nic, or bgp of all
(our side).

Lots of interesting possibilities and the goal is IAAS (Infrastructure
as a service), so any suggestions are welcome.

My hesitation is realizing 6 months from now that I've severely
under-sold the fiber with no good way of correcting my mistakes. The
idea is as cpu, ram and disk usage grows, bandwidth on both fiber links
grow proportionately.

Any thoughts are most welcome!

Best,
--Tim



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