With applications becoming increasingly memory-hungry, memory always seems to be the resource in the shortest supply on a host. In a virtualized server environment, the lack of sufficient physical memory can have a real impact on project ROI, since it will limit the density that you could otherwise achieve.
That’s because, while CPU sockets can support an ever-increasing number of cores, for maximum efficiency, a host has to have a balance of resources available to virtual machines (VMs). If a resource shortage occurs in any one area on a host — such as RAM — the number of VMs that the host can run will be restricted despite plentiful resources in other areas.
The technique of memory overcommitment in a virtualized environment can help mitigate the problem, and using SSD to handle memory overcommitment can produce better results at a lower cost than memory overcommitment on mechanical disk.
Let’s examine the memory limitations of server hardware, how memory overcommitment works, and how solid-state drive (SSD) technology can address the problem.
Read the full article at searchvirtualstorage.com…
