Bob Lee (7/24/2008)
Cost of VM? On several engagements I've been on when the VM vendor states how much cash you'll save they don't mention anything about licensing costs. Or what about the costs associated with yet another server to manage?And I'm curious about the folks who moved to the VM servers. Exactly how did you do your load testing?
Were there other VM's running on the same frame?
Did you use the load testing software that came from the VM vendor? (Really nobody would believe the vendor or the vendor's software would they?)
And while it's easy for you to move things around and stop and start the VM what real production benefit is that for the business user?
Just a couple of questions to find out if this is finally real or just a new flavor of kool-aid.
Bob
You ask some in depth questions about VM, I will give you some short answers due to time constraints.
We did extensive testing before deciding to switch to VM, we used several tools for this that monitor IO, memory, CPU etc..etc.. While there wasn't a real noticeable benefit speed wise, the biggest benefit here was the TCO: In situations where we need extra speed we can speed up our system 'within minutes', in case of server failure we can use snapshots and be up and running quickly and safely.
Our initial testing was done by simply comparing a running virtual server with a hardware server using several packages and many scripts and scenarios that we run into during production. We can monitor true hardware performance using the VMWare Infrastructure Client tools.
The bottom in our experience line is that the TCO is cheaper for VM.
Point to note in our case is that we are running on a dedicated VMWare Infrastructure server.