better platform for virtualization

[Gilad Ben-Yossef]

Hi,


Michael Lewinger wrote:

>
>
> I'd like to ask your oppinion on the virtualization of several WINDOWS 
> servers installed on a client's medium business server room. There are 
> about 6 crucial servers (priority, exchange, file server, and some 
> others) that need to be accessible when they fail. Currently, each 
> server has its own RAID storage. There is only 300GB of data to be 
> kept on those servers (mostly exchange and file server). The 
> virtualized servers should become alive when one of those main servers 
> dies, and theoretically, no more than 2 VMs should be running in parallel.
>
> What would be the best virtualization platform for such a requirement 
> ? Windows 2008 server, or XEN ?
I recommend KVM.
> Would a fast single Xeon processor be able to handle this requirements 
> ? 8GB or 4GB ?
Processor power is almost certainly not the bottle neck in your setup. I 
would guess it is disk IO. But  you really can't tell without measuring.
> Would you consider VMWARE on top of CENTOS ?
I assume you mean vmware server. Putting a critical resource on a 
freebie proprietary program on top of an excellent OS but without formal 
support contract does not sound like a good plan to me.

Just get RHEL 5.4 with the (KVM based) server virtualization option.

We have a setup with earlier version of KVM running for over two years 
22/7 (no typo, they sleep nights ) as a critical system with up to 30 
VMs at any given time in a demanding setup. We had only a single crash 
(and the version we used is two years old) I would run my pacemaker 
software on KVM if I could and if I had a pacemaker ;-)

Gilad.


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Gilad Ben-Yossef
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