Thanks IBM... :P

I have an IBM BladeCenter S in the company, with 6 blades, all of them with local system mirror arrays, four of them are 8GB RAM and quad-core Xeons and two beasts I configured for VM work... 43GB each and 16 cores each... Also the system HAD (notice the tense) on the system 12 SATA2 1TB disks in various RAID configurations, split to three of my blades (the company is just ~10 people, so yes this is not much, like for example an ISP we have as client where I counted 130 full 42U racks, but well it's ok for us).

Long story short, well the system had a problem that IBM spent a few months to decide they couldn't find a solution for. This made our system to automagically transform to 12 SAS 1TB (yes SAS 1TB, fresh fresh) disks with double (redundant) connections to new more advanced RAID controllers, capable of RAID5, any number of LUNs etc. (the old single controller was capable only for RAID0, 1, possibly 10 and 1E - the biggest problem was that I couldn't have more than a single array per blade in addition to the blade native array).

Well this gave new boost to my system as the disks and controllers are not only way faster, but I can make new kind of arrays (not limited in population) AND implement clustering. Which is what I spent the last two days doing and the two beasts now hold a few lab VMs on "local" arrays (not really local, just not shared) plus some production VMs on shared arrays, capable of live migration (using Hyper-V R2, sorry VMWare fans) which is a very nice geeky thing to behold... I shift a live machine in ~10 seconds, but those 10 seconds don't actually matter as I just loose a single ping (or two, tops)...

Much difference than the cluster systems I configured 10+ years ago on NT4 SP3 (btw SP4 had a cluster feature *I* requested back then to Microsoft - so in fact I am talking about 97-9

... Those systems, before SAS, before fiber, before multiple cores, took a few minutes to reset the SCSI bus in case a node died... Great days (and the Amiga was still the best computer on the planet).

Anyway, thanks IBM.