Re: Best options for new PG instance

> On Mar 5, 2018, at 8:53 AM, David Gauthier <davegauthierpg@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi:
>
> I'm going to be requesting a PG DB instance (v9.6.7) from an IT dept in a large corp setting.  I was wondering if
anyonecould comment on the pros/cons of getting this put on a virtual machine vs hard metal ?  Locally mounted disk vs
nfs? 

I've been running postgresql instances on ESXi VMs for years with no issues. I've not benchmarked them, but performance
hasbeen good enough despite their running on fairly wimpy hardware. Performance relative to bare metal is probably
goingto be dominated by disk IO, and depending on how you're hosting VMs that can be anywhere between pretty good and
terrible- in a large corporation I'd expect it to be pretty good. Just don't skimp on RAM - having your hot data in the
filesystemcache is always good and can make high latency storage tolerable. 

If performance isn't critical then a VM is great. If it is, you'll want to plan and maybe benchmark a bit to decide
whetherbare metal is going to be significantly better for what you're doing. 

I wouldn't let NFS anywhere near it. I'd ideally want something that looks to the VM like a locally mounted disk,
whetherthat be really local or served from a SAN or iSCSI or ... 

https://www.slideshare.net/jkshah/best-practices-of-running-postgresql-in-virtual-environments has some hints on
VM-specificthings to consider. 

Cheers,
  Steve