VM what's it all about?

[laughingbuddha]

Hi all,

I've been considering early stage hosting solutions for my social networking project, and until I came across VM dedicated I've considered just buying a crazy powerful dedicated server. Principle idea is to plan the hosting for the prototype and beta version of the service, and then re-address the hosting architecture based on usage results from that stage.

Question is, is it worth considering VM dedicated when your only running a single site/app?

I'm not looking to commit to anything at this stage, but just for opinions.

Matt

[biggles]

Personally I love having a VMware ESX server as my foundation in a server. Memory and processors are relatively cheap, so you always get a little more then you acctually need. Now I can easiliy maintains test and dev versions of my servers and have space for varius other projects when they come along.

BTW: You meant virtual machine with VM, didn't you?

[scott]

We use both KVM and Vmware here extensively for development and QA. Both allow you to clone a running system, which is a great way to do a dry run on upgrades or just make really reliable backups.

KVM was added to CentOS in 5.5, so to install it youd run: yum groupinstall Virtualization

[laughingbuddha]

Yeah, using VMware.

I looked at a video online that explained how VMware ESX worked, but felt there wasn't many advantages when your using a box jsut to host a single site/app. If I was to host multiple site I would agree though.

To use KVM though I would have to start from scratch wouldn't I?

[mikeshinn]

To use KVM though I would have to start from scratch wouldn't I?

You do not. Every virtualization solution runs a real OS (even ESX, which is a running Linux install underneath), so no you don't have to start from scratch. You can just create virtual machines to run from inside your current Linux install. We do that all the time, it works great, and KVM is built into the ASL kernel so you can start doing virtualization now without reinstalling or starting over.

[scott]

Somewhat related, I ran across this web front end for KVM:

http://ovirt.org/old-index.html