Posted by Justin Reynolds on June 19, 2006 at 10:15:15:
In Reply to: Re: Comet + VMware posted by Willie Klein on June 19, 2006 at 07:35:14:
It's mainly about running multiple virtual servers on one piece of hardware, not the flavor of the OS.
At the moment it's just a vague idea. We're considering when we're going to be forced to upgrade our main server (when was Win2K end of life, again?), and this seemed like an interesting angle.
I'm looking at it this way:
A) Lazy Geek
Doing maintenance after hours is a drag. You can't handle MS patches during the day, since a reboot takes down the entire business.
Under VMware, you create independent virtual machines running on your host hardware. One for Comet, for example, another for Exchange, etc. This gives you the ability to do whatever it is you need to do without crippling the day-to-day operations: patch Exchange, reboot the virtual server -- you lose e-mail for 5 minutes, but the domain stays up, Comet keeps working, so forth.
B) Stupidity
Who's bright idea was it to install [some cheapo poorly supported soft/hardware] on the server? Great! Whenever that crashes, it takes the entire server down with it. Compartmentalizing things seems to limit the scope of stupidity; go ahead, crash the Exchange server -- at least Comet will keep working.
C) Cost
Nobody's going to sign the check to buy a rack of servers enabling the same thing in hardware. With VMware, you're looking at $500 or so to max out the RAM on the host machine; the software is free (at the moment, anyway).
D) Fault Tolerance
In the event of catastrophic failure (building burns down), you throw the VMware software on [any-old-$1000-box-from-CompUSA], restore your virtual servers from the most recent off-site backup (you are using off-site backups, right?), and you're back in business. This beats rebuilding a new physical server, in my mind: doing a bare metal restore sounds great, as long as you can track down the same obscure tape drive from 6 years ago..)
.. anyhow. Just pondering.