It sure is. Here is a scenario... Say you build up a CF server on a dual 3Ghz CPU server with 4GB of RAM because you plan to have lots of clients on it eventually. Well 80% of the performance is wasted on day one and it's not until much later in the servers life that you get the benefit of the increased capacity. With VMWare you can start several servers on that piece of hardware, maybe two CF Servers and a SQL Server so you save hardware costs and save co-location costs for the hardware. Then in 6 months time when you need more RAM in your SQL Server you simply reallocate the RAM being used by the VM's so that SQL has more. When you outgrow the capacity of the CF servers you build another VMWare server and move one of the CF VM's to it, without rebuilding the platform and pissing off clients with migrations that cause their code to stop working.
VMWare standard is about 6k. To get the best out of it you'd have two physical servers so your starting point will be two servers and two VMWare licenes. This gives you the ability to have multiple VM's spread across the two physical servers whilst keeping headroom on each physical server to act as the fail-over for the other physical server. In this model if you have a CF server on physical server 'A' that is causing problems for a critical client on server 'A' and affecting the physical server in some way (even though VMWare limits CPU and RAM usage) then you can just shift it to the other physical server. Another situation is when you have clients on CF6 and the hardware is about to go out of warranty (no longer good for production). You're not going to build another CF6 platform to move them to because the costs would be too high for new hardware considering you won't be signing up new clients on CF6. If this was a VM you could simply move the VM to new hardware along with other VM's on old hardware, maximising the return on new hardware and saving time on rebuilds. If your CF6 platform is on physical hardware and it out of warranty then you can use P2V and virtualise the physical platform directly, a very cool feature. There are lots of scenarios but the core elements that keep coming up are "management" and "uptime". So if they are valuable then you'll get a better result with VMWare than with lots of physical servers. Regard Bruce -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Onnis Sent: Saturday, 30 June 2007 5:40 p.m. To: [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: Virtual Servers 101 So really the only benefits would be hardware costs, but you would need to be upgrading things like ram, drive capacityy and cpu to maintain performance, and I guess data center costs for rack space. So is it really worth it? -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bruce Trevarthen (B2 Limited) Sent: Saturday, 30 June 2007 3:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: Virtual Servers 101 An interesting call for Adobe to make, or perhaps it's in the EULA, but I would assume you'd need a license per VM since using VMWare basically allows for several server installs (including OS). Unless using a virtualisation method within a single OS install such as the stuff from SWSoft. Regards Bruce ----------------------------------------- Bruce Trevarthen, CEO ZeroOne (NZ) Limited --- DDI: +64 4 4714444 Mobile: +64 21 567967 ------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Onnis Sent: Friday, 29 June 2007 5:29 p.m. To: [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: Virtual Servers 101 So then from a cf server licensing perspective, can anyone tell me if I could use the same CF license on multiple VMs? -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bruce Trevarthen (B2 Limited) Sent: Friday, 29 June 2007 1:11 PM To: [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: Virtual Servers 101 Hi Steve CPU: VMWare lets you assign GHz per Virtual Server and they won't go over that. So if you have dual 2Ghz CPU's then you safely run 3 Virtual Servers at 1GHz each. You need to keep some core processing capacity available for the host operating system. RAM: Correct, you assign RAM per Virtual Server and to run more Virtual Servers you need more RAM. Since with VMWare Windows is not your base host you don't need to consider STD versus Enterprise. But VMWare does have three versions to choose from with various Virtual Server feature support in each. For example VMotion is only in the Enterprise edition. SOFTWARE: Again you're correct, each VM is just as if it were a physical server in the eye's of software licenses, even Microsoft still expect a Processor license per Virtual Server even though it's only one physical CPU underneath it all. OTHER: Yes you can run VMWare "farms" and you can have things clustered, the best way to setup VM's is to have consolidated central storage, i.e. a SAN. Then the actual server doing the "front-end" delivery of your services is not the same hardware housing the virtual machine images, means you can "image" and "move" virtual servers from hardware to hardware without shifting the (what could be) 100GB virtual machine image. Enterprise edition VMotion allows you to shift servers from hardware to hardware whilst still in production, I've seen this done and the process dropped 3 packets in the process and no users noticed. Without enterprise edition you can still do cool stuff like move a VM to another server for the sake of performance without a rebuild, but because the VM needs to be offline for imaging you'll have several minutes down time in the process. Cheers Bruce ----------------------------------------- Bruce Trevarthen, CEO ZeroOne (NZ) Limited --- DDI: +64 4 4714444 Mobile: +64 21 567967 ------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Onnis Sent: Friday, 29 June 2007 3:02 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Virtual Servers 101 I have posted this in both the water cooler and in cfaussie cause I don't know who's in who :) And it sort of follows on from the whole licensing costs topic and I guess optimizing cf server setups. Couple of questions RE virtual servers CPU --------------- If the CPU maxes out in a virtual server, does it max out in all the others? I mean it is after all the same CPU being used across the virtual servers. RAM --------------- I have played with the VMWare locally and I had to split my ram up into blocks for each VM to use. This means a healthy machine with say 4 gig of ram, to be able to run multiple VMs would have to have, I would say, at least a gig of ram each. Is that right? Then you could run 4 VMs on a single box? So if you wanted more VMs then you would need to get more RAM. Depending on the initial OS your running, you would probably have to upgrade your OS to be able to use the extra RAM you put in as well. Software --------------- How would running VM help with software licensing? You basically run each VM as its own independent OS don't you? So if you had 4 VMs running, that means 4x OS licenses, 4x CF licenses, then FTP servers and any other stuff you need to run on it. Wouldn't that then increase the cost? Or is it for the machine itself? So could I install and run a single CF license on multiple VMs legally without having to purchase a new license for each VM? Not to mention the initial OS license cost for the machine itself. I know you have the advantage of quickly being able to set up new VMs by duplicating an existing one, but at what cost to the server. I wouldn't imagine you could run VM server farms, although that would be good if you could. 2 VMs on a single machine clustered. Mmmmmmm interesting for my feeble mind. Mind you, this whole topic of VMs is out of my realm of experience, so would be great to get some feedback/advise/pointers/corrections on what im saying Steve --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
