[Gllug] Xen - bit of a ramble

[Russell Howe]

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:45:44PM +0100, Matthew Cooke wrote:
> I guess this is in danger of turning into a rant :) I can see why companies 
> might consolidate onto some really high end Solaris system with hotswap and 
> a sun engineer sleeping in the same rack but I fail to see why there would 
> be any rush to consolidate enterprise services on to x86 boxes.

Indeed. I do however see consolidation in this respect as useful where
you have a clustered or load-balanced service.

Say, for example you have a load-balanced web site, a few DNS hosts, a
couple of servers running spam/virus scanning, a couple of MXes, a
couple of NFS servers, etc..

If you do it all under virtual machines, it shouldn't matter too much if
an entire physical machine dies, as the others should be able to take
the load. It does, however, mean you only have to buy maybe 2 or 4
servers instead of at least 2 per clustered service, if you want to keep
services running on dedicated 'hardware'.

I find virtualisation a nice way to fine-tune the OS for a particular
service (i.e. service X requires a, b and c to be installed &
configured)

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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