[Gllug] Xen - bit of a ramble

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:45:44PM +0100, Matthew Cooke wrote:
> I read about server consolidation all the time in marketing literature but 
> I don't really understand why you would do this with low end hardware.

Horses for courses ...

There are two places we have found where "server consolidation" makes
a lot of sense.

Firstly we run lots and lots of rather disparate websites, all running
with different underlying technologies (eg. Perl vs. mod_caml vs. PHP
vs. CGI vs. static).  It's theoretically possible to run these all
from the same Apache webserver, but in reality that's both fragile and
difficult to set up.  We use virtual machines to run each website,
with a front-end web accelerator which distributes the different
requests to each back end VM.  This could equally well be done using a
single machine and having many instances of Apache running on
different ports, with the accelerator listening on port 80, but using
many virtual machines also offers isolation.  If one website goes
crazy, it won't take down all the others.

Secondly our long-term goal is to get 2 or more mirrors of our Xen
server running and use live migration to provide some sort of load
balancing & fault tolerance.  This means we can shift virtual machines
between physical machines on the fly.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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