[Scottish] Virtual machines

[Phillip Bennett]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phillip Bennett" <phillip at mve.com>
To: "SLUG-list" <scottish at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 2:58 PM
Subject: [Scottish] Virtual machines


> 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.
>
> All comments appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Phil.

I just re-read that and realised I should probably clarify the 'backup 
server'.  Basically it's just a small RHEL3 box running Netbackup.  It has 
an LTO drive attached via SCSI and will soon have an ATAoE array for 
backups.  It does nothing but run backups once a night.

hth,
Phil.