jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Dec 3 15:48:50 CST 2012
As mentioned by others, the fact is that you can easily run VMs as you need them or even multiple at once all one a single box. I converted an old server which has 6 cores and 32 gigs of ram to be a VM server. I actually run 6 different VMs on one physical box - 24/7/365. I have: 1) 4 boxes running my Accuzip 3rd party address validation software. 2) Another VM running a SQL Server instance for my "Access over the web" stuff 3) What I call my "dev machine" on which I have Visual Studio 2010 and everything required to do my dev in that. 4) On the physical machine (the VM Server itself) I have my SVN Server and the code repository. So I basically have 7 "machines" running on one physical box. Yea it has 6 cores and yea it has 32 gigs of ram but that is ho-hum hardware today. To have 7 physical machines actually running to do that would be silly. Heat, electricity, noise, maintenance... Silly. John W. Colby Colby Consulting Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it On 12/3/2012 3:08 PM, Arthur Fuller wrote: > Ok, maybe I am getting something absolutely wrong here, but I fail to > comprehend the VM thing. It seems to me that given the plummeting price of > hardware, VMs have no reason to exist. For example, all you need for a > bitchin' Linux box or XP box or Windows 7 box is about $500 or less. Said > box would run way faster than any VM, and if you have a KVM then you have > about 4 or 5 boxes all running at once, and push a button to switch from > this one to that one. Granted, there is also the consumption-of-electricity > issue to to factor into this, but even granting that, I still don't get it. > So let us suppose that I want two Linux boxes, onw XP box, one Windows 7 > box, a dedicated server, and although I don't yet have the money, a Windows > 8 box. The XP and Linux boxes think 2GB is wealth. The Win7 and Win8 prefer > a tad more, and the server more than a tad more. But my point is, why not > just buy a separate box for each task? We're not talking about huge amounts > of loot here. And the gain is that everything runs as quickly as it can! > > So maybe I'm missing something important here; in which case, please > educate me. > > A. > > > On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 5:17 AM, Salakhetdinov Shamil <mcp2004 at mail.ru>wrote: > >> Hi Stuart and John -- >> >> Thank you for your comments. >> >> Yes, I do remember MS DOS Stacker etc. but I have never used virtual hard >> disks in MS Windows: I have asked about performance hit because I have >> found that when setting a "map network drive" share from VM to a host PC >> virtual harddisk it takes some time even to create and save via notepad.exe >> a small text file. During that time notepad.exe becomes "frozen". When you >> restart VM with "map network drive" share automatically remapped then such >> a "performance hit side effect" disappears... >> >> Anyway I'm going to try using virtual hard disks to keep the source files >> and test databases for my customers projects... >> >> Thank you. >> >> -- Shamil