Comments on: Virtualization – Save Time, Money and Sanity

By: cmuench

cmuench — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:17:04 +0000

Virtualization is th way to go. We use virtualization every day at the coampny I work even for production boxes. Its great to not have to trudge to the data center to use the console. Also its very very easy to add harddrives or work with isos. Overall I would not trade my experience with vmware for anything. And hopefully when I get a MacbookPro this June I will be putting parellels on it so that I can run Vista and my favorite linux distro side by side.

By: ciaranmg

ciaranmg — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:26:34 +0000

Your timing is impeccable. This is a topic that I’m really interested in right now as we’re about to take control of our in-development website and I wanted to set up dev and staging environments for our in-house team going forward.

I’d like to know where I can find out more about the different options available and how it all works together.

By: Curious

Curious — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:24:51 +0000

Are there any limitations on the free version of VMware Server?

Also, Virtual PC 2007 seems to be a free download from Microsoft… Why are both of these products fee? Is it to entice enterprise customers to try them out?

Just Curious

By: AnandC

AnandC — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:19:56 +0000

Having been at a large technology company, I have worked with massive VMWare infrastructure set ups. For internal applications it is not uncommon to also have production inside a VM at large companies. It really does save on development costs. Imagine shared dev boxes for functional teams working on a large projects. Instead of having to buy 6-8 servers, you can just get one beefy server and set up a VMs for each team. Not to mention this saves on energy, space, and other costs of maintaining physical infrastructure.

For most people the cost of an ESX server is far to great, especially for the audience that usually frequents SitePoint. The way I use VMWare WorkStation for small development is as follows:

1. Run Linux on VMWare on my desktop. I SSH in and use my dev tools on Windows to do all my work. It is also nice to be able to take snapshots at different points in case I mess things up with an install.

2. My VM image is portable, so if I need a subcontractor to work on something, I have the option to send him the VM image. This is really handy when I absolutely need a contractor to have the exact same distro and environment as me. I can also move the image onto a laptop quickly so when I have a client meeting, I can easily show them rough cuts of my work.

Of course for test and production, I usually host it on a single Virtual Private Server at a hosting company and have subversion set up to push out changes between the two.

Good luck to all future virtual machine users!

By: fumbler

fumbler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:20:37 +0000

Have any thoughts, comments or feedback on using it in a production environment?

By: mihd

mihd — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:13:07 +0000

i posted bout this in browser testing thread here as well few days ago :)

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=462563#10