Re: And so it begins...

["Lukas Beeler" <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 21, 2008 5:33 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > From: Lukas Beeler
> > Virtualisation is very nice technology. But it also has it's downsides
> > - especially I/O can become very expensive,
> Haven't seen that.  While it's certainly not comparing apples to apples,
> moving from Outlook on Windows to a virtualized Linux IMAP server, searching
> 20,000 messages went from 150 seconds to 15.

Outlook before 2007 didn't index messages. Every halfway decent/modern
IMAP server does.

> > and backing up virtual
> > machines can become a PITA if you do not want image based backups.
> Why is that?  If you want to do incremental backups, you can run the backup
> software in the VM just as you would a physical machine.  On the other hand,

Yep - but as soon as you begin to virtualize, you'll have a lot more
machines going around (usually). Another part of the problem is that
I/O can tank if you don't have enough throughput in the host machine
for multiple virtual machines running backups.

> backing up the whole VM is incredibly easy, especially in these days of
> cheap disk storage.

In my opinion, decent disk storage for use in a company is still very
expensive. And consumer stuff is slow.

> More importantly, virtualization shields you from hardware failures.  The
> way I'm configuring my system, I can lose any piece of my hardware,
> including the motherboard on my primary server, and still function.  It may
> be a little slower, but I'll function.  I just move my VMWare image onto my
> primary workstation and run from there until I replace the server.

Yeah, that's one of the niceties you get from it. I like
Virtualization, and i also use it a lot. It's just that it doesn't
make everything magically better.