[COLUG] VMware (was February Meeting solicitations)

[Jeffrey Tadlock]

Scott Merrill wrote:
> The intent is to run low-resource services in virtual machines to make
> it easy to manage / migrate / recover.  

What are you plans for recovery?  Will you be backing up the actual 
virtual machine files or just the guest as if it was sitting on a 
physical host?  If you are planning on backing up the actual virtual 
machine files, do you have plans on how to make hot copies of them yet?

> Our plan is to run ISC DHCPd on
> one VM; DNS on another.  I'm considering independent VMs for httpd and
> smtpd (on another host machine) as well.  Most of these services are not
> particularly memory hungry, so a VM with 256MB RAM ought to suffice.
> Web and mail probably some additional breathing room, which is why I'm
> interested in other people's experiences to date.

I have had pretty good luck so far - though I agree memory usage has 
been a more limiting factor than processor power (and I/O also before 
processor power).  My production VMs ended up on a host with only 1GB of 
RAM and the host is also serving a small file share and some internally 
used web pages.  The guest VMs are configured to use 386MB of RAM and 
256MB of RAM.  Those machine have been running fine.  No one knows we 
even moved them into VMs.

One of my dev servers runs with 2.2GB of RAM, serve other roles and 
hosts three or four server OS's, plus a client OS for testing.  It 
handles the load fairly well.

Another of my dev servers runs with quad 700MHz processors and 4 GB of 
RAM.  It typically runs with 4 server OSs, one of which is a SQL server 
which is pretty resource hungry.  It also seems to do fine.  This is the 
box I will most likely be shuffling these VMs off of this coming up week 
and trying ESX server on it.

> I'm planning on using Debian as the guest VMs as well, since the base
> install is under 400 megs, and no unnecessary services are installed.  I
> recognize that Debian is not a "blessed" distribution from VMWare for
> either host or guest OS; but the savings in resources makes it a more
> attractive option for me.

We use CentOS in our VMS, but that is due to it being the Linux 
distribution we have settled on.  It works just fine (once you tweak the 
clock issues mentioned earlier this week).  I have run Debian as guests 
with no issues though (my home test environment has numerous 
distributions running in various VMs).

I asked in another post, but since it looks like you are running all 
Linux based hosts and guests - did you look at Xen before choosing 
VMware products?

--Jeffrey