Web servers running on VMWARE?

[groovin]

anyone use any of the vmware flavors (GSX, ESX) to run virtual servers for public web sites? or has anyone heard of anyone else doing so? just curious as to what your experiecnes have been like. thanks

 

[azev]

Lately I've been seing alot more web hosting company offering virtual server hosting. I am not sure which virtualization software did they use, but according to my research Virtuozzo is the most popular. Go to webhostingtalk.com you can find out so much info there about this.

 

[skyking]

I've had a virtual server before. It was nice to have all the options that come with that level of control. The only snag I had was poor mysql performance.

 

[n0cmonkey]

VMS? Sure. But I think if you had a VMS machine you could think of better things to do with it.

Virtual machines are interesting. I think NetBSD is using Xen to host multiple servers on one machine.

 

[JackMDS]

When using Virtual Servers the Internet connection per-se is Not a problem.

However, No matter what, Virtual Computers are slower than the same installation done directly on the hardware.

Therefore (as mentioned above by Skyking), if you have a Web Server that needs to perform heavy Local use as part of the serving (like dealing with a large Data Base) it will work slow through a Virtual Interface.

:sun:

 

[Nothinman]

Therefore (as mentioned above by Skyking), if you have a Web Server that needs to perform heavy Local use as part of the serving (like dealing with a large Data Base) it will work slow through a Virtual Interface.

Or you could just put the database on a seperate box not inside a VM. Or use something like Xen that doesn't cause as much of a performance hit.

 

[azev]

like nothinman said, if you put the database on a different server (not a vm) it will speed up things. Most of virtualization software have memory management function. If the server running the vm have alot of memory, you can asign more memory on a vm and it will also improve speed. But like JackMDS said, its not going to be as fast as if it was installed on a single box. Virtualization is mostly used on a server consolidation so that cpu/memory utilization can be maximized. On a high traffic box, virtualization is not recomended, because sometimes, even a single box is struggling to meet all the request.

 

[EatSpam]

VMWare just released a free VM Server. Its GSX Server, but free. Its still in beta for now.

 

[jondercik]

Vmware is the best way to run servers.

 

[ktwebb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Therefore (as mentioned above by Skyking), if you have a Web Server that needs to perform heavy Local use as part of the serving (like dealing with a large Data Base) it will work slow through a Virtual Interface.

Or you could just put the database on a seperate box not inside a VM. Or use something like Xen that doesn't cause as much of a performance hit.

Which is exactly what you do. VM's can run many server products. Hard hit database is not one of them. You run your webservers in VM and use a connection string or ODBC to get to the database on a SQL MySQL or whatever database software you want to use.

Webserver are the perfect application for VM's. We run web clusters, citrix servers, application servers and are just starting to get into DC's and other software via VM's. There was a comment about physical boxes outperforming Virtual machines. Ya think? yet I can run 6,7,8 or more Virtual machines on one blade with dual Xeon's and a chunk of RAM. Apples and oranges.

 

[FreshPrince]

I see the most value in VM when use in Disaster Recovery scenarios...

your primary can be real or virtual, but your D.R. site should be all virtual...

replicate each server's virtual image to the D.R. site and you can have it up and running in a matter of minutes instead of days...

 

[ktwebb]

your primary can be real or virtual, but your D.R. site should be all virtual

Not really. Applications than run well in VM sure. But if our data center gets wiped away and we have to rely on a DR SQL farm, VM's are not going to do the job. Alot of our 800 or so servers are in VM at the dark site but not all. And the ones that aren't shouldn't be and won't be. VM's are a good choice for disaster recovery but not always the best, or even a workable choice.

 

[cmetz]

groovin, I know lots of folks using VMware for production data center stuff.

Unless you have strong technical staff, get ESX. It's expensive, and pretty much forces you to use expensive hardware, but when you're done you have a more solid and more likely to be successful setup.

VMWare server might be interesting when it comes out of beta. I can't really field something that will stop working in June.

JackMDS, Windows on top of ESX can be faster than Windows on top of native hardware, thanks to Microsoft's retarded I/O. It can be slower, too. Depends on your exact workload.

 

[spyordie007]

Another vote for ESX.

Using virtualized hardware in the data center has a ton of advantages, scalability, compatability, disaster recovery, cost, etc. In smaller organizations YMMV because you still get nailed on some of the priciest items (i.e. a SAN) if you try to set it up "the right way".

If you set it up right (i.e. partitioning out the hardware, especially physical disks) you shouldnt have performance issues.

 

[JackMDS]

Just a side note to the topic.

As of yesterday Microsoft offers Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition (both x32 and x64) as free download (you need free passport registration to be able to download).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta...-4f56-af96-7b95975db13b&DisplayLang=en

:sun:

 

[spyordie007]

Virtual Server is a very good application if you're looking for smaller-scale virtualization. Especially if you're running Server 2003 R2 Enterprise (because the licensing allows you to run up to 4 virtual instances on the same server for no additional cost). However for large-scale virtualization I'd say VMWare still has the upper-hand with ESX.

Erik

 

[ktwebb]

MS Virtual server's competition at VMWare is GSX or what will be VMWare Virtual Server. There is no comparison when your talking about ESX. However the price certainly makes you rethink it. But for large enterprise applicability MS Virtual Server cannot compete with ESX.

Incidentally ESX3, which is now in Beta, supports ISCSI and NAS technologies. I am installing it today hopefully on one of our blades on the Test Chassis. Will be SAN LUN's for the space though so I won't be able to comment on the other storage functionalities and performance. I will be booting from SAN though, which is nice if you have the SAN infrastructure in place, especially with IBM HS20 blades. One hard drive if your running an HBA in the expansion slot so single point of failure. Pathetic and incredibly poor enterprise solution. We however were not asked our opinion before they were bought.

 

[groovin]

we went with ESX and have begun creating vms... great stuf.. scaling up is definitely going to benefit us. We can have 4-5 vms running on a dual processor system pretty easily. we also started using vmware server (freebie) on test machines. So, needless to say our racks are going to get alot of space cleared up soon!

 

[FreshPrince]

good for you!

 

[cmetz]

MS's current Virtual Server offerring is currently an intelligence test, as far as I am concerned. You deploy it in production -- you failed. No way am I layering a bunch of VMs on top of a full Windows OS.

MS is working on a more hypervisor like architecture, and that might be okay.

One of ESX's strengths is that it has its own hypervisor for the VMs, while letting the Linux "service console" OS handle a lot of the maintenance chores like booting and software updates.

 

[Czar]

I'm running now 4 vm's on a single win2003 server running GSX server, works like a charm

 

[spidey07]

The big push here is huge boxes running vmware. Blade servers are really taking off as well.

The unix boxes are huge as well (32 processors, hundreds of gigs of ram) and have 10-30 partitions on them.

 

[groovin]

im actually kinda surprised how many sys/net admins i talk to from big companies dont know what virtualization is... im sure they will find out soon enough though.

 

[her209]

Using VMotion, you can move a VM to a different physical server without turning it off. Score!

 

[ktwebb]

VM's need to both be able to access the same SAN LUN. THe lun needs to be a VMFS volume and other assorted requirement but yes, VMotion is a nice feature and works well.

ESX3 will support ISCSI and NAS technologies, which should help out those wanting VMotion functionality via Virtual Center but don't have a SAN infrastructure. VMotion capability is very expensive when you consider the prerequisites and licensing but the ability to move servers around and do things like scheduled maintenance without taking those servers down is very nice. Migration from one Host to the next for us takes a few seconds. I don't even see a spike in pings on the server though.