Virtual infrastructure

[N2RJ]

Anyone using VMWare with virtual infrastructure?

We're playing around with it here, probably going to build out one of our sites using VMWare.

[M0GLO]

We had some great successes with it at State Street and Fidelity.
It worked best for stuff that was not resource intensive of course, or a mix of resource intensive and non resource intensive applications so the host didn't over load.

Total dream for QA and Dev, they'd always screw up their environments so after we virtualized them it was a 20 minute breeze to rebuild back to base as opposed to the nightmare I am sure you are already familiar with.

Just make sure you do some REAL load testing on all the virtual machine simultaneously to get an idea of how the host performs under stress or you'll be sorry!

[N2RJ]

I am talking about virtual infrastructure - i.e. a cluster of machines connected to a SAN or iSCSI that you treat as one large resource pool and divvy up into VMs.

THAT is what I'm architecting right now, and it's not for a dev environment either. It's for a full blown DR environment, which we may even be running production traffic on if it works good enough.

I just finished building out a dev environment with VMWare virtual infrastructure. Running RHEL4 look alike (CentOS 4) on 6 virtual machines. They're running an app that uses Tomcat (5.5.26 w/Sun SDK 5) and BEA weblogic for the middleware.

I am very much impressed. We are doing load testing next week, but just using the environment under normal load is super fast.

The machine we bought for this is a HP DL580 G5 with Intel 4 x Quad core, 3GHz each (16 cores total), 32GB RAM and 1TB of SAS drives with a HP (compaq) smart array RAID. Kick ass machine that we can fully utilize without wasting resources.

At AIG where I worked before, we did a server consolidation project using VMWare. But we ended up using blades instead of standalone boxes. The power and space savings were staggering.

I'd really like for us to reduce our carbon footprint this way - believe it or not, News Corp has spent a lot of money going "green". They call it their "cool change" initiative. Virtualization I think is a great way to save money, electricity and lower our carbon footprint.