Loading ...I don’t think there are too many surprises here. Using server virtualization makes managing the servers easier, but cuts performance roughly in half (43%).
I never quite understood the craze with virtualization. I suppose the enterprises here are pushing this adoption, wanting to have the ability to manage their servers independent of physical boxes in your server farm. For a small business with 2-10 servers, I don’t see the huge advantage here… I actually see a disadvantage to having 1 huge server box as opposed to 10 small 1u servers… what if your giant server goes down with 10 virtualized servers on it? Then all your services go down at once, as oppose to say just loosing your email box.
This is part of the reason for my surprise of the level of support for virtualization, it’s the new craze, but brings with itself a fair share of cons as well.
Hmm, maybe if I was Google I would understand why this was so cool.
Update #1: I knew the readers were smarter than I was. Ben Smith had an excellent followup in the comments section and Laurence Hartje provided some great insight into reason for virtualization. I’ll enumerate their insights here:
- Most servers aren’t running at 95% capacity all the time. All of the time they aren’t is wasted utilization that could be applied to another service of some kind, lower overall cost of hardware to companies.
- Disaster Recovery. You can simply mirror the virtual server every night as a backup, and if the hardware it is running on fails, you can quickly fire up the image immediately on another piece of hardware with almost no down time.
- Easy to backup. Just mirror the entire VM to an image and back that up.
- With some VM software (like VMWare) you can setup automatic fail-over. Meaning if one VM crashes you can have it terminate that VM and simply reload the image into another VM with almost no down time.
Honestly after looking at that list, those are some very compelling reasons for virtualization.
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March 29th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Interesting article. When it comes to load testing like this, you have to ask yourself “how often is my app under full load?” If your answer is 95% of the time, then virtualization might not be the answer, or you need to look at running multiple virtual machines to distribute the load. If your app is never under full load, then you have some seriously under utilized hardware sitting around doing nothing. My guess is that the majority of the sites out there are not maxing out their hardware.