Hello all,

I have been running a couple of KVM servers on SL6 for quite some time, 
and have been very happy with performance.  One of these machines hosts 
five instances of firewall software (a mix of pfSense and m0n0wall) and 
I'd like to port this configuration to SSDs (RAID-1) to increase 
reliability.

My question is how do I minimize writes to the disk array?  Is it 
possible to significantly reduce disk writes once the host SL6 OS has 
booted up and the guest OS's are running?

The current hard-drive-based box has lots of RAM (8 GBytes) and each 
guest has a pretty small footprint, so swapping has never been invoked. 
  So far the current SL6-based firewall pretty well runs itself with 
very little effort on my part, so things like syslog are usually not 
monitored much.  Can the /var filesystem be safely mounted from a file 
server or does it have to be on a local drive during bootup?

I do let logwatch and logrotate run on the current box (with hard 
drives) but I'm tempted to reduce logging to a bare minimum and rotate 
logs to /dev/null

At this point it's all somewhat academic, but I'd like to consider the 
possibility of reducing heat and eliminating as many moving parts as 
possible.  I like KVM and would prefer to stick with it.  I don't have 
the luxury of running a bunch of embedded diskless firewall boxes, 
unfortunately.

Your suggestions??

Thanks in advance,
Chuck