We have 5 servers on 5 different machines. File, Print, Database,Ldap, and a backup server. We got a nice heavy duty machine,. Planning on running all 5 servers on that one machine, each virtually...
Is it possible? Has anyone tried before? btw can virtual box be ran solely terminal wise, no GUI? I've never tried that before...
Planning on running Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit Server edition. I don't think Lucid is stable to be trying it out ... Suggestions?
I lack any kind of expertise at virtualisation, so I would not venture more than "yes" as a guess. Nonetheless, shouldn't the backup server be physically separate from the rest?Originally Posted by Matus
Perhaps you should reconsider Lucid in view that Ubuntu 10.04.1 is available?
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True enough, perhaps the backup can be taken from the 5. will take that into consideration, im still googlng for maybe examples people have tried. Yea I did consider the Ubuntu Lucid, but as I've seen many bugs with the desktop. I think I'd stick to hardy for the time being
Note that you will need an a lot better machine than if you just run the 5 services in one OS. RAM is the most important. Virtual machines waste a lot of memory (duplicated OS footprint, each VM managing its own, etc). For 5 VMs, assuming the servers all have negligible load, you'll probably want at least 4GB.
With that many VM running you will probably run into CPU performance issues also (all the switching).
Running 3 VMs idle brings my machine (Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM) to its knees.
I think hardware wise, no prob we can get enough ram and stuff. Tho i know still might run into probs like u say, but still wud love to try. just a quick question, do you know what tutorials wud b best to follow, or best said do u know if there are any ?
If you use VMWare ESXi it should reduce the amount of memory duplication, since it has some way of removing duplicate pages of memory and only keeping 1 copy that's shared between all the OS's that reference it. If all the VM's are the same OS, a lot of their memory blocks should be the same.
But still, for 5 VM's I'd probably shoot for at least 4GB if not more.
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I think 5 VMs would require a quad core and at least 8 Gb ram for smooth operation.
Edit: And Virtualbox is awesome. I use it to run Windows 7 in Ubuntu and vice versa. So easy to use, just click and install the guest OS. An excellent piece of free software.
Last edited by happyclown; 09-28-2010 at 07:08 PM.
OS: Linux Mint 13(Maya) LTS 64 bit.
Why are you doing this? Really, why are you going the virtualization root?
Have you considered lighter virtualization (lighter than "Virtual Box")?
I'm running twelve servers through virtualization and about 30 virtual machines of various sorts on a single quad board with eight GiB of RAM. It isn't at all difficult if you have experience administering the server stack for whatever you are doing.
How much processor and RAM you actually need depend on the software running on the VM and how the VM software manages resources. For example, if you are only running a local LDAP for a small company, you could probably get by with a 80 MiB slice with the right software stack.
And you can of course combine different virtualization for different focus. I have a 20 MiB slice running a tiny HTML server in a container for purely static pages and a 1500 MiB slice running on a "Virtual Box" instance for the fancy stuff.
Most importantly though, the security of virtualization is myth. You are still going to have to manage a lot of stuff even if your FILE server is supposedly isolated from the backup server. If you can hire a really good security administrator to configure your new box to run all the servers from real hardware, you'll probably be a lot better off.
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