On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote:
> I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it.
> I've read a bit about Xen & KVM and have had several companies visit
> College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) & M$
> HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open
> source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for "business
> critical" systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be
> very important.
>
> Can anyone recommend a good book / books for me to start me down this
> road :-)
>
> Thanks
> Brian
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily
>
> the views of Portsmouth College
>
Take a look at Sun's VirtualBox. I cannot sing it's praises enough. Last
year we set it up with a couple of instances of server 2003 acting as
Domain Controllers. The Host OS is Ubuntu with 3 NIC's, 2 are bound to
the Virtual 2003 servers. Ironically we are now using it in production
as it's so stable. There are only 40 of us so I can't say how it would
cope with lots of users. That said, the company website is load balanced
onto IIS running on it and that has been faultless too (the caveats
being the usual Microsoft type issues - not the VB itself). It's worth a
gold star and I can't shake a stick at it.
VMWare is expensive, XEN is very good if you want to spend time learning
it. VirtualBox you can have running in the time it takes to fry an egg.
My plan was to cut my teeth on VB and move to XEN. So far no need.
Good luck!
