[Scottish] Virtual machines

[Kevin Campbell]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 02:58:44PM +0100, Phillip Bennett wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I will be buying a new server in the next couple of months and would like 
> to put a VM on it to get rid of one of our other servers.  The new server 
> will be our main file server.  It will be running ldap, samba and DNS, but 
> mainly just serving files.  It will also be a domain master for our 
> network.  I'm looking to get two quad core xeons and 8GB RAM.
> 
> What I'm thinking of is running our backup server in a VM instead of an 
> actual machine.  It only ever does any work after hours, when the other 
> machines are idle, so I figure they shouldn't interfere with each other. 
> Does this sounds like a viable idea to everyone?  Or should I not bother. 
> I'm worried about the performance hit the machine could take during the 
> day, but as I'm not a VM expert, I figure there shouldn't be too much, as 
> the VM would be doing very little (if anything).
> 
> If this sounds viable, which VM would people recommend?  I'm thinking of 
> either Xen, VMware or KVM.  KVM would be harder, as I'll be running RHEL 4 
> or 5 on it.

Xen is relatively stable and will do what you need. The overheads are
small, but it would also add overheads to your fileserver, not just to
the backup virtual machine.

K