Fabricio Araujo wrote:

> Alexandre Benson Smith escreveu:
>> > Further, most VM Host software actually has a very low overhead.
>> >
>> > If that wasn't the case, no-one would be moving major applications
>> like email and database servers to VMs.
>> >
>> The Sysadmin from one of my costumers decide to install vmware on a new
>> server (2x Quadcore, 8 GB RAM, 4 x 500 GB SATA on RAID10).
>>
>> Prior to the vm instalation, the hourly nbackup complete in 8 seconds,
>> on vm machine it took around 8 minutes ! (60x slower !) (nbackup + 7zip
>> the file)
>> A back-up using gbak on bare metal takes 30 minutes (gbak + 7zip the
>> file), on vm 1:30h
>
> Depends on the VMWare version and configuration... I can say that a VERY
> BIG brazilian magazine store (known countrywide) uses VMWare to the
> bones. Dozens of virtualized servers and even call center desktops are
> on VMW software.
> Works OK. But the free VMware server 2.x is really heavy a lot (1.x was
> much lighter).

Since starting this thread I've had another machine with problems.
Maxtor disks really need to be taken out of systems ASAP, but that is
another matter - the one I've just had fail is still under warrentee -
just. But it is my own fault, I THOUGHT I'd already replaced them all!

So what would I do differently using VM?
I'm rebuilding the disk from scratch. First OS then 'apps'. This
particular machine had to be W2k and I installed that up to the latest
patches. In the 'VM' case would I still need to do that? You say
'install OS' and then load VM ... and restore image? Is that the normal
method?

In my case I install OS until Windows update is clear ( 7+ reboots this
time ) but I can install Apache/PHP and Firebird while Windows is still
downloading ITS updates, so by the time I get a stable OS, I also have
all of the server software loaded, along with my own 'image' which is a
copy of httpd.conf (php.ini is part of my PHP zip), the backup of the
database, and the current website directory. I'm back up and running as
soon as the OS is ready.

I know I should be working simply with 'images' of the hard disks, but
that often fails when the motherboard needs changing. So is there a
'better' way to restore a machine? Does VM give me any time advantage
here? Or is there another way of working this?
( Linux I can be back up from a clean machine in under and hour normally )

On site we just rename the backup machine, so users don't even need to
know that the main server is down, but I DID have a problem here as
'FIBS' had stopped backing up after a site power down over the weekend
for maintenance on the UPS system. One of the network shares had not
restored, probably due to the order machines came up, and this disabled
'FIBS' so I lost a couple of days backup until it was noticed, and the
missing days are on the dead Matrox disk :( SO in future I need to CHECK
that the backups are still running! ;)

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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