adding search-heads to search-head pooling...

[a212830]

I am building out a new Splunk 6 with some new, shiny, heavy-duty servers (yay!). We are setting up search-head pooling across two servers and it got me thinking - is there any reason that, in the future (or even now) I can't add vm's to that search-head pool? They are going to be using the same NAS disk. Pro's? Con's? Seems like a nice, inexpensive way to expand search-head pooling...

[twinspop]

In my experience, VMs are poor search heads. The I/O requirements of Splunk are just too high. Additionally, SHP requires the use of an NFS share, which also slows down SH performance. Doing both is a double-whammy. Sure it works, but the performance is pretty poor. We recently got physical servers to replace our SHP'd VMs and the difference is night and day. (Even more so when I was testing them out before putting them in the SHP.)

[a212830]

Thanks for the info.