Virtualisation Questions

tntcoder

tntcoder

tntcoder

Soldato
Joined
7 Apr 2004
Posts
4,212
Hi,

I have recently heard a lot of talk about virtualization, the other day someone was telling me how their company had got a new uber intel xeon quad... setup, and were planning on using it as a 'xen box' to isolate different server roles.

Am i correct in thinking this is basically the idea of having 1 host OS, then installing x number of different VM guest OSs for every role you wish to isolate? i.e having like mail server and a web server on separate guests?

I guess this has a lot of positives: Security - cant hack from the guest OS to the host OS, and if something goes wrong for a certain service, you can simply restore a snapshot. But on the downsides does running say 4-5 guest OS's on a single physical server have much of a performance impact?

My other question was in terms of the virtual machine software used for this kind of setup, I hear things like VMWare ESX Server, and Xen mentioned a lot? How do these products differ to your average home users VMWare Workstation / Virtualbox?

Thanks,
Jack
 
whitecrook said:
We have 2 main servers running AD, DNS etc as a cluster service, and a NAS backup server and a handful of other servers (fax, dhcp, ftp, etc etc) and to get a middle of the road virtual server replacement would cost about 30 grand for about 50 users.
Click to expand...

Thanks, this puts it in perspective! I had no idea the hardware would come in at that kind of price and i would hope performance wasn't an issue for 30k+ :D

They sound very interesting though, think i will have a play around with some of the software and mock up some kind of system.
 
Hmm interesting thanks, could you tell me if an I could run say ESX Server as the host OS, then say run 3 guest OS's on an AMD X2 4400+ CPU (which from your above post i guess has the SVM flag, i don't have it handy to check) with 4gb of ram.

Guest OS 1: Fileserver NFS or Samba
Guest OS 2: Web server
Guest OS 3: Backup system, maybe rsync.

Would that be enough hardware to run that kind of setup acceptably? Im not talking hundreds of clients here or extreme stability, just for home use and learning :)

Also, maybe a stupid question but is a monitor required to administer ESX Server? Can i do it all over SSH?
 
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