[H-GEN] Linux Distribution for A Dell Poweredge 840?

[Nick Kwiatkowski]

David Jericho wrote on 28/02/2007 09:13:33 AM:
>
> Adrian Sutton wrote:
> > We've just taken ownership of a new Dell Poweredge 840 that we'll be
> > running VMWare on to provide various demo servers (IWWCM, Confluence,
> > Vignette and pretty much every other CMS you can imagine on various
> > OS's, all on VMs). We figured Linux would be a less resource hungry
> > host OS and should provide better memory management, but we're stuck
> > on deciding which distro to use.
>
> If you're serious about your virutalisation, you'll give a host OS a
> skip and go straight to VMWare ESX or VMWare Infrastructure 3.
>
> Of course, your alternative for virtualisation is Xen.
>

I would strongly agree with David's suggestion, ESX will give you far
better performance. In essence ESX is build on top of SuSE base, but VMware
have done a number of low level integration to improve performance for the
virtual filesystems. With ESX you have better control of the resources
allocated to each VM, and minimum levels for critical VMs.

Xen is an alternative, but if you are concerned about performance and
reliability, I wouldn't use Xen just yet, or without some careful proof of
concept testing to ensure that it will work for the purpose you plan.

The other key factor to consider (regardless of the VM platform) is
physical memory, 1) if your guest OS don't have enough for BAU operation,
they will swap, and memory swapping on a vrirtual disk is slow. 2) If your
host doesn't have enough to run all VMs, you can get a cascade effect.

Anyhow, that probably used up my 2 cents worth of random comments ....

Cheers,

Nik


Nickolas Kwiatkowski
IT Architect (Certified)
Architecture Services
Global Business Services - Application Services
IBM Global Services, Brisbane, Australia
phone:  07 3213 2149,  mobile:  0412 121 276,  email:  nickolas at au1.ibm.com
"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity" - Albert Einstein