Can Jira be hosted on virtualized servers?

Question

The system requirements docs state:

Please Note: JIRA requires access to a local disk for certain functionality. If JIRA does not have read and write access to a local disk, searching and saving/accessing attachments will not work.

Can Jira work with fibre-attached storage instead of local disc?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Yes, it does.  And virtual servers.

There is a trick with the disks though - whilst it's fine to put the attachments, plugins and the rest on shared storage, it's worth avoiding it with the index.  Most of the files it needs are static, or speed of access is not a critical feature, but for a performant Jira, you really want the index on the fastest dirtiest disk you can find.  Hence the advice to use a local disk - I really would NOT recommend putting the index on anything other than a local disk.

Experimenting with replication on Jira 4.0 showed us that even simple replication was a massive drag on performance.  That may have changed since, but I'd test it carefully, and I suspect even with recent performance improvements, you'll want a local disk.