Does the term VMWare ring a bell?

[Sparky]

Hi there,

We use VMware a lot.  It does work very well indeed, you can have lots of virtual systems on the same physical hardware (ala mainframe), however!

It might not be such a good idea to run critical applications off of those virtual machines, the reason being that they are all reliant on the hardware and OS underneath, should that hardware or host OS drop dead then you don't end up with one system down you end up with ten! Or twenty or thirty!  (depending how many client OS's you install)

That said we use IBM hardware (funny that what with us being IBM an all :-) and they are REALLY nicely built and not your el-cheapo build it at home job PC, they are 4 CPU, 16Gb RAM, SAN backend and nicely engineered ... but they do still fail .. this week we had one of the gig-ethernet board die ... required an outage of the whole system to fix as the Linux host OS doesn't support hot swap PCI (yes I know the Linux now supports it, but the one IBM use is about Redhat 7 level .. which is a supported configuration so no changing it)

The moral of the whole VMware thing is ... Buy the best hardware you can if you are going to use it.

Regards

[Sparky]

In regards to how many host OS's you can run, it really depends what applications you want to run.

Heavy weight apps like UAE (CPU intensive) might not be a good idea .. also graphics output won't be to swift either ... so a dedicated system would be better.
Where as webservers and smaller database applications wouldn't be a problem for a VMWare environment.

VMWare also makes for a very nice disaster recovery setup, you have your real servers on one site doing all the day to day work and then have a mirror copy of that at another site but using VMWare hosts rather than duplicating the pjysical hardware .. saves money and would allow a business to keep running (maybe a bit slower) until the primary site is back up again.

VMWare is also used a lot for testing work, once you've created you test host you can duplicate it very easily so that when you stuff things up, just click the revert button and a few seconds later you are back in the running.

Regards

[Sparky]

Regarding mirroring :  

Hmmm ... can you explain what you mean ?  Are you talking about doing a stretched cluster where one real host is in one data centre and the other is an OS hosted on a VMWare machine in another datacentre ?  In which case it would be up the OS's being clustered to sort themselves out.

Or do you mean about mirroring the data ?
Or making a backup image of a virtual host on the VMWare machine ? (in which case just copy and paste the files to another directory .. job done)

Regards

[Sparky]

gizz72 wrote:
@Sparky
 I mean mirroring where one real and the other  running under VM as data center, whereby the 'real' one fails.

Likewise, you've answered the question, just cut and paste. Thanks. :-)

Ahhh.  In which case it would be the job of the OS and/or application software to handle the failover.  The OS could handle the mirroring of the data as well or you could reply on the backend storage hardware to do synchronous copy to another storage system be it SAN or NAS.  No big deal really just need to make sure the supporting infrastructure is up to scratch .. for enterprise level stuff it's not worth skimping on money, get as good as you can afford and get the best support you can afford as well.

Regards.