On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 09:39, Tobleman, Vicky wrote: > We're considering partitioning larger Intel servers using VMware and setting > up our Linux environments ... production and development. Is anyone else > doing this - have any experiences to share? Pros/Cons? And is 6 servers > per engine consolidation reasonable (i.e., 4 engines would equate to 24 > machines)? Realizing that it is dependent on type of workload - file, > print, web, etc. We've got a few Linux Intel boxes and would like to avoid > the WinTel farms we've acquired.
It's a reasonable idea. Obviously how many virtual servers you get per physical box varies by workload and by box. In general, if what you want to do is file, print, and web (but you don't need IIS-specific stuff for the web applications) you're better off in terms of performance-per-cycle with Linux than Windows--you probably knew that, though. Linux/390 gives you much, much better manageability than a farm of VMWare boxes, but you probably knew that too. One thing that VMWare gives you that is absolutely wonderful, and too often overlooked, is consistency of hardware. Two machines of what is supposedly the same model from the same vendor will, in the x86 world, often have notably different components; VMWare does an end-run around that, so the "hardware" each of your VMWare images sees really is identical. That makes a fair chunk of the pain of Windows go away right there. Adam
