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Server Virtualization
Hey Folks - We need your help. We were hoping, we could gain from your experience with implementing server virtualization. When should we be using Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Virtualization, Xen Virtualization, Microsoft Virtualization, Oracle Virtualization and VMWare. I will be very interested in learning from your first hand experience. I will also like to know, under what situations is one virtualization preferred over the other. - Thanks for your help
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In my humble opinion, Redhat (xen), Citrix (again, xen), Xen are still very new for me to support at this point.
Xen also is best used on hardware that supports virtualization (like the Intel VT chip).
VMWare is mature, stable, rock solid, offers several free components and has great management tools.
MS is, well...MS. They continue to alter the release date (is the server version even out yet?), so I question their real support of their own product.
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They continue to alter the release date (is the server version even out yet?)
Yes and it requires hardware virtualization to work (dumb move.)
I love VMware. I use the free version for production and it works great.
I equivocate, therefore I might be.
My Linux/Unix Boxes:
Home: Slackware 10, CentOS 5.3, RHEL 5, Ubuntu Workstation 9.10, Work: RHEL 5, CentOS 5
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Virtualization is great for a few things, but not always full scale production use.
For development, testing, etc. it just rocks. For backup or disaster recovery, it is good also. For main production use, you'll find that even if you allocate 100% of resources, the vms will not use a true 100%...
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Although I agree not everything lends to virtualization (heavy disk i/o, a resource hog that requires huge amounts of RAM, etc), (at least)VMware is ready for everything else.
websites/apps, domain controllers, application servers, some database's, test/dev/qa, distribution servers, management tools, and anything else you can think of are fully supported and workable in a production VMWare environment, saving thousands of dollars in hardware and support costs (power, a/c).
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websites/apps, domain controllers, application servers, some database's, test/dev/qa, distribution servers, management tools, and anything else you can think of are fully supported and workable in a production VMWare environment, saving thousands of dollars in hardware and support costs (power, a/c).
It also depends on the class of the server. I'm running on a third generation Dell Poweredge 2950 with two four core processors and 16 gigs of RAM (obviously a 64 bit machine). Also, you can get pretty granular on how you configure your VMs to make them run efficiently.
I equivocate, therefore I might be.
My Linux/Unix Boxes:
Home: Slackware 10, CentOS 5.3, RHEL 5, Ubuntu Workstation 9.10, Work: RHEL 5, CentOS 5
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Obsolutely!
VMWare's resource management is not to be over looked.
When mixing prod and dev guests, you can "promise" the prod servers a certain amount of CPU time at the cost of less important dev machines.
A great way to guaranty resources to critical machines in a mixed environment.
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I'm really enjoying having VirtualBox both at work and at home. It gives me a clean place to test things from time to time, and also an easily replaceable place to tinker if I'm worried about something breaking my main system. At work it's great because I can throw a Linux distro on my Windows PC and not only do I have another platform for testing, it's actually more convenient for doing a lot of things (I'm hoping I can talk them into letting me run Linux natively on my next PC).
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VirtualBox is cool no doubt and VB can read VMWare disk files, but not the other way around.
So if you plan on using VMWare at some point, VB isn't a great option.
Also, Sun just bought VirtualBox so it has the support of a "big" company now.
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It looks like qemu-img can convert from VirtualBox to VMWare images if you're looking to switch. Doesn't necessarily help if you're trying to use both to run the same VM, but at least there's a migration path.
And the fact that Sun bought them is kind of funny because Sun is one of our competitors.
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