Re: Virtualization vs. sharing a server

Ramiro,

I don't know why virtualization is considered a no-no.  We use VMware ESX. 
On some smaller applications we run both the application and database on
the virutal machine.  We've not had a issue with this combination in 5+
years.  We also have 6 images that run on 2 machines just for the
appliations.  Each of these 5 machines is running Windows 2003 Server with
Citrix XenAPP.  We do have 2 database servers that are running 2 Quad Cores
Intel processors, one with 32 gig and one with 64 gig.  We also have a
couple of old PIII 1 Gig machines running as our AD servers.

Each of the database servers are currently running SQL Anywhere 9 and MSSQL
2005.  We've never had a issue.  We keep one server (64 Gig one) as our
primary server and the other as a hot backup with auto failover.

If it were not for the virtualized application machines we would have had
to purchase quite a bit more hardware.  Since these are all quad core with
32 gig running Windows 2003 64 bit, we can run about 100 users concurrently
on each application server before we start to see a strain.

In the past 5 years we've had one time when (when we only 2 physical
servers) and we lost one and the other was able to handle all of the
application needs although much more slowly.

I think that the success of virutalization is like anything else, having
the right people to set it up.  We have no one in our compay to do this
kind of thing so we contract it out to others with platinum certifications
from the various vendors (Citrix/ Windows Servers and VMWare). 

When we finish our commerical application to production we will probably
contract with EnterpriseDB to help us with tuning Postgres and the servers
they run on.

Best Regards

--
Michael Gould, Managing Partner
Intermodal Software Solutions, LLC
904.226.0978
904.592.5250 fax