I decided to take the plunge and move all my servers to VMWare box. My buddy, Dr. Phil Heil got me hooked the VMWare stuff. If you haven’t heard of VMWare, it is the best thing since sliced bread. VMWare allows you to run multiple virture machines (hence, the term VM) on a single box. Essentially, you run a base vmware configuration which runs the vmware software, then you can create as many new virtual machines as you would like.
Running virtual machine is great for computer programs since you can quickly set up a particular computer configuration and test your code on it. Since VMWare supports snapshots and copying of vmdk files, you can quickly get back to your based configuration or create another instance very easily. In my case, I wanted an easy way to experiment with different server setups and a way of isolating web servers, email servers and data SQL servers. Separating servers is a best practice when hosting e-commerce sites.
Phil, our IT guru has been running the companies servers on them for many years now on a windows based system. I wanted to run mine on a linux box since linux is fast and the VMWare server software is free for linux. After doing some research, I found the following tutorials which proved to be exceptional.
VMWare Server in Production by Brian Downey and
How to Install VMWare Server on a CentOS 5.0 Desktop by Falko Timme
Follow these two guys tuitorials and you are as good as gold. After that you can set up as many servers on your box as you would like. Windows on Linux, Linux on Windows, you name it, you can do it.
#1 by Phil Heil at July 27th, 2009
VMWare on CentOS is great when you need access to the underlying operating system. The newer VMWare ESXi runs on a tiny kernel and has a much smaller footprint. It’s perfect for getting your base machine up in a hurry and for testing. It still leaves a little to desire on the management side, but that where VMWare ESX shines (and costs a lot of money).