Obviously, virtualization does cause you to lose a small amount of hardware power to the extra operating system overhead of vistualizing many machines on one physical server. What you can gain in reliability may make it worth it, though.
Basically, you could guarantee that any 'dedicated server' is available much more reliably. If you connect your bladecenter to a SAN of some sort, and are able to intelligently distribute VMs over the blades, then if a piece of physical hardware goes down, the VM can be automatically booted on hardware that is running properly, with very little data loss because of I/O that was interrupted by the hardware issue. Since all the data from all the servers is stored on the SAN, the data is somewhat shielded from hardware failure. There are a few virtual machine platforms that will allow you to accomplish this, including, I believe, VMWare ESXi (I think they changed the name of this recently) or Xen... You'll have to do your own research into these if no one else replies, since I have absolutely no experience with virtualization. You will also probably have to expect that you will be spending a huge amount of money building a SAN that is both fast and reliable. If you run the datacenter that the servers are hosted from, then you could also expect better cooling and power usage efficiency by going this direction, and if not, you will at least be using less rack space. A bladecenter will require a lot more power per rack than a rack full of 1U/2U servers, so you may have to pay extra per rack for the extra amperage you'll need. On 2/22/2010 1:29 AM, Christoffer Pedersen wrote: > Hi everyone. > > Im looking to build up a new farm of servers for my company. We are > currently using 1U and 2U servers for our hosting, but i have been > thinking of, if it was better to build the whole stuff in > bladecenters, and virtualize. I just want to know if this is any good? > I have never tried to host srcds on virtual machines, so i would be > happy if you could help me here :) > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
