Application Install Guide » Virtual Machine http://www.application-install-guide.com Everything You Need To Know About Software. Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:46:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 How to Set Up a Virtualization Server http://www.application-install-guide.com/how-to-set-up-a-virtualization-server/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/how-to-set-up-a-virtualization-server/#comments Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:18:39 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/?p=479

By using a single physical server to run many virtual servers, you can decrease operational costs and get far more bang for your buck. Te best part? you can do it cheaply and easily. It’s impossible to buy a server today that isn’t multicore, but many small-business requirements don’t call for that much horsepower. Te end result is a relatively expensive physical server that does little but consumes power and generates heat. That’s why using a multi-core server, one with 4, 6, or 12 processing cores on a single CPU to host several virtual servers makes sense, no matter what size your company is.

Virtualization Server

Choosing a Host
The key to successfully virtualizing servers in a smaller environment starts with the physical host server. Tough it will be responsible for hosting possibly dozens of virtual servers, it will require far fewer CPU resources than you may think.

Depending on the virtualization sofware (aka the hypervisor) that you use, you will likely be able to run a surprising number of virtual servers on a four or six-core CPU. Te reason for this is that generally most servers run near idle a large portion of the time. When they are tasked with work, their resources tend to be spread out among the CPU, RAM, disk, and network input/output, with only a subset of the virtual servers requiring significant CPU resources. By taking advantage of this law of averages, you can consolidate multiple physical servers onto a single host server.


That isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, however. Some servers, such as database servers, run heavier loads more consistently, and may not be suitable candidates for virtualization in a smaller infrastructure. It all depends on the hardware resources available to the host server, on the virtualization sofware features, and on the requirements of the virtual server. Fortunately, setting up and testing these requirements beforehand isn’t difficult.

In choosing the hardware, a good rule of thumb is that having more cores in the host server trumps having higher clock speeds; if your choice is between, say, a 4-core CPU running at 2.93GHz and a 6-or 12-core CPU running at 2.4GHz, you’ll be better off with the latter. The capability to spread the virtual-server load across more CPU cores typically translates into faster, more consistent performance across all the virtual machines.

Virtualization Server

Virtualization hosts can always use more RAM, so be sure to get as much as you can, and to select the fastest type available. It is relatively straightforward to oversubscribe CPU resources to allocate more virtual CPUs to the virtual servers than physically exist within the host server but it’s far more difficult to oversubscribe RAM. The more RAM you have, the more virtual machines you can run.

In smaller environments you may not have a storage area network or a network-attached storage device to hold the virtual server images, so the host server will be responsible for the task. In that case, more disks are better, within reason. For general purposes, SATA drives in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array will suffice, although SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives will always provide increased performance.

Virtualization software

Virtualization Server

As for the sofware, you have some free choices. The free VMware Server runs atop Windows or Linux. It isn’t a baremetal hypervisor in that it relies on the underlying OS to provide key requirements for operation. It isn’t as fast or as fluid as other types of hypervisor, but it is usually easy to install and use. For a completely cost-free approach, consider installing Linux on the server and running the Linux version of VMware Server. Otherwise, installing a licensed copy of Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and running the Windows version of VMware Server is an alternative.

VMware also has a free, bare-metal hypervisor, VMware ESXi. It’s built on the same baseline as VMware’s larger, expensive ofierings and provides stable and responsive virtualization, but it has some constraints as to the hardware it can run on.

Microsof’s Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V may be a good flt for Windows-oriented networks. Technically it isn’t free, as it requires purchasing Windows Server 2008 R2, but it has a simple interface and is well integrated into the OS. If the virtual servers that will run on the host are Windows Server 2008 as well, you may flnd the licensing attractive. Buying one copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 permits the running of up to four virtual Windows Server 2008 servers, for the price of a single license.

you’ll also flnd other options, such as Citrix’s XenServer. The free version has features that may not be in VMware’s free ofierings, such as multiserver management. XenServer isn’t as mainstream as the others, but it can be downloaded and in stalled for free, and it does not need an underlying OS or OS license.

Continue for more info:
Mastering VMware vSphere 4
VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference
VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide
WIN SVR 2008 HYPER V RESOURCE KIT

]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/how-to-set-up-a-virtualization-server/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-21 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-21/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-21/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-21/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-21/feed/ 1 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-14 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-14/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-14/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-14/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-14/feed/ 1 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-31/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-31/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-31/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-31/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-24 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-24/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-24/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-24/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-24/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-17 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-17/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-17/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-17/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-17/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-10 http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-10/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-10/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-10/ ]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-10/feed/ 1 Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 http://www.application-install-guide.com/microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2007 23:08:16 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/

Your legacy applications won’t work under Windows Vista? Run it under an older operating system you’ve loaded into Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (VPC 07). The utility may not be quite as full-featured as VMware Workstation, but it has one big advantage, because it’s free!

VPC 07 runs under Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate, plus XP Professional and Tablet Edition, but not Vista Home or XP Home. You can install nearly any PC-compatible OS inside its virtual machines, though. I got DOS 6.22, Red Hat Linux, Windows 95, Windows 98, and two instances of XP working. The virtual machines can all read the system’s CD and DVD drives and can take turns using the floppy disk drive. But for USB support, you need a competitor: VMware or Parallels Workstation.

Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac 7.0

VPC can save and restore a VM’s state but has nothing like VMware’s multiple snapshots. It does have an equivalent to VMware’s “linked clone” feature, and wizards ease the creation of VMs and disks. All told, I found VPC 07 intuitive and stocked with everything casual users need to manage programs that don’t like Vista.

]]> http://www.application-install-guide.com/microsoft-virtual-pc-2007/feed/ 0 VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta http://www.application-install-guide.com/vmware-workstation-60-beta/ http://www.application-install-guide.com/vmware-workstation-60-beta/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2007 23:08:13 +0000 Sean Mize http://www.application-install-guide.com/vmware-workstation-60-beta/

The world of computer virtualization (the ability to simulate one computer running entirely within another computer) is getting crowded. At one time, VMware Workstation was essentially alone in this world, but competition from Microsoft and Parallels, along with kernel support in Linux, and now even hardware built into Intel processors has crowded the field. Even VMware has its own free virtualization tool, VMware Server, that’s been horning in on its ever-popular VMware Workstation. Fortunately, the development of Workstation continues, culminating with the release of version 6.0 beta.

The biggest news in this latest release of Workstation is that it supports 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista as a host OS and guest OS. VMware also adds full support for the latest versions of Ubuntu, Mandriva, Netware, SuSE, Solaris, and Red Hat OSes. When you install the proper VMware tools into the virtualized OSes, there’s much better drag-and-drop support. Also new is multiple-monitor support, which lets you indicate how many monitors you want the virtual machine to detect, no matter how many monitors you attach to the host.

Under the hood there are direct hooks to common programming debuggers that make it easier for programmers to look at low-level emulated hardware and operating system issues. Virtual machines can now fully run “in the background,” and each machine also acts as a VNC server without the hassle of installing any specialized VNC software in the guest. As always, there are several networking options, which even let you develop a small, private network on a single PC among multiple virtual machines each running different OSes.

Although there’s a long list of known issues in the Readme file, the beta feels free from problems. The debugging code, however, does render VMware Workstation a little slower than its previous versions.

Official product name: VMware Workstation 6.0
Version previewed: 6.0 Beta 1
Publisher: VMware
Developer and URL: VMware
ETA: Q2 2007
Why you should care: The best in PC virtualization gets better.

[tags]VMware, virtualization[/tags]

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