[Gllug] Virtual disk allocation advice requested

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 3:35 PM, David L Neil Mailing list a/c
<GLLUG at getaroundtoit.co.uk> wrote:
> Bruce Richardson wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 08:11:20PM +0100, Richard wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 01:43:29PM +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
<snip>
> Bruce,
>
> It is not what I thought I was asking, way-back, but this twist to the
> discussion has been interesting.
>
> The interpretation that is emerging, in my mind at least, is that in a
> corporate situation where /home is on an NFS server, it might be better
> to have a dedicated server (one machine-one task model) both for
> security and for performance-dependence reasons. ie some things might be
> 'virtualisable' but others best not.
>
> If we were talking a corporate or ISP with a rack of servers or a whole
> server farm to manage (and planning to rationalise/virtualise), would
> the following make sense?
>
> 1 functions to keep under pure-Linux/BSD/etc:
>  DHCP
>  DNS
>  NFS of /home dirs
>  ID and auth functions of the likes of LDAP, MySQL, Kerberos
>  NTP
>
> 2 functions which could run in (para)virtualised DomUs:
>  mail: SMTP, POP/IMAP
>  HTTP
>  DBMS
>  LDAP for non-ID directories
>  group/departmental/shared file servers: NFS, Samba, sFTP
>  Desktops, terminals
>  background routine job processing
>
> Can proxy web servers and load balancers be lumped in as "HTTP" or are
> they worthy of special attention?
>
> Regards,
> =dn
>
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>


There are no clear cut rules about this and most of it is pretty much
based on your knowledge of how your services work. There is no
intrinsic service that is best suited for a VM or for a regular Linux
only configuration.

You can lump together in one machine  different VMs supporting several
services that are not too taxing, other people group services based on
more bureaucratic organizational reasons (for example all the services
for a given project in one machine).

I have seen all of the above services on VMs at some point or another,
so at the end it all boils down to experience. Perhaps you can start
with Linux only and once you understand the demand of a given service
then you can decide if it is wise to "promote" it to a VM of its
own...

Regards

Jose.
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