A lot of what I’m going to write about here will be about virtualisation.
My day job involves a lot of work with VMWare – Server, Workstation, and Infrastructure/ESX.
My home workstation – a Mac OS X-running iMac – has VMWare Fusion to let me access Windows apps and test Linux set-ups.
But where I’m looking for my own side-line in Linux hosting is Xen. I’ve found that VMWare Server’s performance isn’t that impressive and it has a degree of overhead that’s just not required for a remote headless server environment. VMWare ESX is a much better system for this sort of environment, but has a considerable cost implication.
Xen’s paravirtualisation approach seems a little weird if you’re used to VMWare, but thankfully there’s some excellent tools which massively simplify the process of creating the VMs. In some ways it’s even nicer to be able to just issue a command on the command-line and not have to bother with mounting ISO images and doing a ‘normal’ install.
At the end of March I’ll be transitioning my server, which currently runs all services on a non-virtualised Gentoo box, to a Xen-based virtualised machine running on Ubuntu with all the main services running as separate VMs. In order to do this with minimal downtime I’m going to be utilising some odd and weird hacks.
I’ll document this closer to the time, and this is where I’m going to perform the post-mortem and document my further experiments with Xen, VMWare, and other shiny toys.
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