Re: Postgresql in a Virtual Machine

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Lee Nguyen <leemobile(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having attended a few PGCons, I've always heard the remark from a few
> presenters and attendees that Postgres shouldn't be run inside a VM. That
> bare metal is the only way to go.
>
> Here at work we were entertaining the idea of running our Postgres database
> on our VM farm alongside our application vm's. We are planning to run a few
> Postgres synchronous replication nodes.
>
> Why shouldn't we run Postgres in a VM? What are the downsides? Does anyone
> have any metrics or benchmarks with the latest Postgres?

Unfortunately (and it really pains me to say this) we live in an
increasingly virtualized world and we just have to go ahead and deal
with it. I work at a mid cap company and we have a zero tolerance
policy in terms of applications targeting hardware: in short, you
can't. VMs have downsides: you get less performance per buck and have
another thing to fail but the administration advantages are compelling
especially for large environments. Furthermore, for any size company
it makes less sense to run your own data center with each passing day;
the cloud providers are really bringing up their game. This is
economic specialization at work.

(but, as always, take regular backups of everything you do that is valuable)

merlin