OT: Rogers and Home-based Business Networks?

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Marc Lanctot wrote:

> I have never liked the idea of running a server on a virtual OS. It seems to 
> be the popular thing these days but to me it's always been just a waste of 
> perfectly good hardware.

That's interesting.  One of the reasons I'm such a fan of virtualisation 
is that it makes such good use of perfectly good hardware :)

Running a box mostly idle is a waste of hardware and energy, IMHO. 
Running 50 or 100 virtual boxes provides much better use of the hardware.

Advantages include lower purchase costs, lower running costs, task 
seperation so important in prod networks.

> At this point, money is probably more important than my preferences, so I'm 
> entertaining the notion that I might be wrong. :)

:)

> - Have you ever done any performance tests and compare the result to an 
> equivalent non-virtual OS on the same hardware? Since I'm doing more than web

Lots of testing has been done as this is a key question.  Virtualisation 
covers many different products with different characteristics so 
performance testing is very much specific to a particular virtualisation 
app.  You can find a lot about virtualisation performance online.

Physical/virtual comparisions also vary a lot based on the workload.  Some 
forms of virtualisation run at close to 100% for CPU but are slow for 
disk I/O for example.

I setup OpenVZ[1] at work and it typially performs at upwards of 97% of 
the performance of the physical hardware.  OpenVZ writes directly to real 
filesystems so doesn't suffer any I/O performance problems.

[1] Technically this isn't virtualisation at all, it is jailing but these 
two concepts often solve the same problems.

Cheers,

Rob

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