July 10, 2005
Server Consolidation
At work we have just started using VMWare to consolidate the number of servers that we are running as much of the software can not run in the same operating system but does not utilise the full amount of resources provided by the server. By running Virtual Machines with our software also allows us to easily run multiple versions of the software and easily roll back to older versions when a research direction proves not to be fruitfull. While reading around on Slashdot there was an article about Xen, which is an open source virtualisation software. Currently Xen requires the guest operating systems to be compiled specially for Xen and therefore only select Linux distributions work. However, support has recently been announced by AMD and Intel to support Xen at the hardware level to enable any operating system to take full advantage of the Xen platform. Maybe in the future I will be able to use Xen rather than VMWare, it will be very interesting to compare the performance and features.
Links
Xen Source Wiki
Xen Source
Slashdot
