Re: Guest Partition Storage Configuration

Evan,

Based on your description of the situation, I think most will agree that best practice would have you create your storage spaces in SYSBAS. If you isolate the drives for the storage spaces you will degrade the I/O capacity to a point where I wonder if the performance of the guest partitions would be sufficient. Allow IBM i to do what it does best, manage storage.

If you had an iASP that had many disk units in it to eliminate the I/O issues, then you could consider that. For now I would create the storage spaces as needed and let them do their thing.

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 6/21/2011 5:20 PM, Evan Harris wrote:

Hi All

I'm looking to create a couple of guest partitions on a customer box
and I'm wondering how best to go about configuring the storage.

The partitions are intended for use as "application servers" in a JDE
environment and require about 500gb each.

Is it better to:
- isolate the storage space(s) on to some specific disks by
configuring a user ASP and then creating the storage space(s) in that
ASP
- just create a bunch of storage spaces in the system asp rather than
trying to isolate the IO
- what are the effects of creating one storage space vs a number of
storage spaces vs isolating in an ASP
- some other variation (like forgetting the ASP idea entirely

Isolating the storage spaces in an ASP seems to offer some recovery
advantages as well, but I;m not sure whether this outweighs whatever
disadvantages they might also create.

I'm not sold on any particular approach as yet, I'm just trying to get
some perspective/opinion from people who've done this in the real
world.

if you've implemented a guest partition(s) how did you do it and what
would you do differently ?

-- Regards Evan Harris http://www.auctionitis.co.nz