I have several Xenserver boxes running (very well). Most of ours are setup with a RAID1 with two mechanical 7200rpm enterprise sata drives, or RAID10 with 4 7200 enterprise sata drives. The sata drives were selected due to high capacity for the dollar and are WD RE4's, so they are of good quality and decent mechanical drive performance.
I have extra budget to get some nice things for my department, and we were considering getting some SSD's for our virtualization infrastructure. The question is:
Will Xenserver benefit from the SSD's? This isn't such a simple question as it gets complicated when you think out the various possibilities for storage.
We don't have the budget to setup a proper SAN(s) so network storage is out of the question for the time being (guest os's will be stored on the host).
There is no question that the VM's themselves would benefit in performance if they resided on the SSD's, but due to low capacity of SSD's, we were looking at the possibility of having Xenserver itself run off a SSD, however we are questioning if this would have any benefit (does dom0 need high i/o performance? does it matter? or will VM's only really benefit from SSD performance?).
Xenserver configs are fairly basic so having it run from a single disk is not a worry for us (we would just throw together a fresh install then import the VM's from the storage array).
Please advise. (but please don't just say, "yes of course SSD's are better", because it depends how they are used).