[The General]

HI,
I am looking to Virtualise 2 x 4 CEC p570 systems with 80GB RAM. I am looking to decide on whether or not I should split out the Network VIOS and the Disk VIOS onto their own dedicated LPARs, i.e. have 4 VIOS in total.

The Virtualised p570's will most likely host Database Servers, and WebSphere App Servers LPARs. The Database Servers would not be of Warehouse sizes or throughput and I would consider them to be relatively small.

Any suggestions appreciated

[ross.mather]

2 Virtual I/O Servers is unough in most cases. There is no actual need to use separate VIOS for disk and ethernet, as the two services do not interfere with each other.

If you have the new P6 570 (MMA) then look at the shared ethernet cards to see if they can pick up the Ethernet traffic rather than the virtual I/O server.

[duke900ssd]

2 x 4 CEC p570 ?
Is that 2 x p570, each with 4 cecs?
Are you going to create two similar systems and HA the vio client LPARs between the two systems?
If so you'll want 4 X vios minimum, 2 x vios per p570 for redundancy.
If you notice vio performance is slow with both disk and network on just 2 x vio per system then it is fairly easy to create another 2 x vio and move the disk or network to the new vio servers, or just whack some more cpu and memory into the vios lpars.
Bang it all together with 2 vios per system and test. Without trying there is not really any way to know for sure but as Ross said, disk and network on the same vio is not a problem in most cases.

[ross.mather]

Sorry, I gave a bit of a rushed answer - 2 VIO servers per 4 CEC p570 is the usual apprach.