[rescue] Cheap, fast, PC server

[Devin Ganger]

On 1/26/08 8:55 PM, <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> My big question in all this is why are people using VMs so much?
>
> I can understand using them for some applications where you need to
> give someone a machine, and a virtual one will do.
>
> But for just splitting things up for management or security, it seems
> to me that things like Solaris zones and FreeBSD jails is a lot more
> efficient.
>
> It's also probably a lot faster.

If you're doing everything all in the same OS, yes. However, if you've got a
variety and want to maximize hardware use while minimizing power and cooling
load, VMs are the way to go. VMs also have the advantage of being a lot
easier to move onto a different server in the event of hardware issues --
simply have one backup process on the host to appropriately suspend and
protect your VM files, and another backup process on the guest to capture
the data that's changed (treating the two much like a full and a
differential, respectively).

--
Devin L. Ganger <devin at thecabal.org>
Devin on Earth: http://blogs.thecabal.org/blogs/devin/