Re: And so it begins...

On Jan 21, 2008 5:33 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Lukas Beeler
Virtualisation is very nice technology. But it also has it's downsides
- especially I/O can become very expensive,

Haven't seen that. While it's certainly not comparing apples to apples,
moving from Outlook on Windows to a virtualized Linux IMAP server, searching
20,000 messages went from 150 seconds to 15.

Outlook before 2007 didn't index messages. Every halfway decent/modern
IMAP server does.

and backing up virtual
machines can become a PITA if you do not want image based backups.

Why is that? If you want to do incremental backups, you can run the backup
software in the VM just as you would a physical machine. On the other hand,

Yep - but as soon as you begin to virtualize, you'll have a lot more
machines going around (usually). Another part of the problem is that
I/O can tank if you don't have enough throughput in the host machine
for multiple virtual machines running backups.

backing up the whole VM is incredibly easy, especially in these days of
cheap disk storage.

In my opinion, decent disk storage for use in a company is still very
expensive. And consumer stuff is slow.

More importantly, virtualization shields you from hardware failures. The
way I'm configuring my system, I can lose any piece of my hardware,
including the motherboard on my primary server, and still function. It may
be a little slower, but I'll function. I just move my VMWare image onto my
primary workstation and run from there until I replace the server.

Yeah, that's one of the niceties you get from it. I like
Virtualization, and i also use it a lot. It's just that it doesn't
make everything magically better.