Virtualization and you

[thekemp]

Hey guys,
I am doing a Literature review on the advantages and disadvantages of using virtual enviroments.

i am looking for any comments, opinions or input regarding this technology, i'd like to hear from anyone not just admins who impliment virtual machines.

so if you have some input as to why you like / hate / love please feel free to comment.

Thanks for any input

Jon

[GroundZero3]

How interesting, I am in the process of moving some of our servers over from a live box to a virtual box. We are running HP Proliant BL460c blade servers and im running Vmware ESXi attached to a SAN. Eventually I would like to have another Blade running ESX and implement Vmotion (which will hopefully be soon).

So far I haven't found anything I hate about it, the only thing im concerned about is running ESXi on one blade, if something happens to that blade all my VMS will be offline. lol! (Another reason why I want to implement Vmotion)

As for the positives, we have a lot of boxes that sit around all day doing nothing CPU intensive. We are wasting a lot of rack space and power for these boxes, so to be able to put them into a VM and use virtual resources is always a good thing for me. I work for a school district which means im using taxpayers money everyday, so anything I can do to save a couple of bucks for those who pay taxes is a good thing! So far it’s a slow process of moving services over to a VM (politics, downtime, ram) but eventually I plan to empty out 2 to three racks of equipments running vms.

With Vmware Server and now ESXi free, there is no reason why anyone running a small to large business shouldn’t be looking into any kind of virtualization. It reduces cost of hardware and power, which higher ups are always looking for! Vmware isn’t a complicated thing too, which makes it very nice. Once someone learns the interface and how to setup a vm, pretty much it runs with little to no maintenance. Of course im saying this since I just started to deploy VMS into a production network. Give me a couple of months and I might have some complaints

Virtualization is very interesting to me that a while ago I made a howto for vmware server and linux

HOWTO: Openvpn and Ubuntu (Dapper)

[Steve R Jones]

I support a high dollar accounting software package....As much as we'd like to have all of our clients on the same version - it never happens.

So instead of me have several pc's (which I do have) I now run four different VM's on my main/best pc.

I've used Virtual PC for many years but am now preferring VirtualBox....Have never tired VMWare.