[Scottish] Virtual machines

[Keith Sharp]

On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 14:58 +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.

You should go with RHEL or Centos 5 rather than 4 if possible - these
already have Xen support built in.  As Kevin mentions Xen is pretty
stable and will do what you want at no extra cost.  You might want to
look at VMware Server which is free, and in my experience slightly more
stable than Xen and has better management tools.

Keith.