I just wanted to add something into this discussion. I work with a client, where all their systems are on VM's on some major hardware (yes I know this is how VM's tend to work best). We recently had a system that died after the OS rebooted, the OS would not come back up. Because we had numerous VM backups, we could restore a previous VM and be back up right away instead of having to wait to rebuild a system.
With 1TB drives selling for around $100, it is easy to use a VM with a backup to a slow/large 1TB drive so that if something does happen, you can be back up in a matter of minutes instead of hours. For a setup like this, I would suggest a 10GB system partition with the OS and ColdFusion installed on it. All the data on a separate D drive. If something happens to the 10GB system partition in the VM, you ditch that and bring up a backup from a previous version and you are back up and running. By having all the CFM files on the D drive, the C drive, with the OS and CF, only has some system settings that probably do not change very often. And with backing up the 10GB VM to the external 1TB drive, you could have 100 VM backups, which ended up being good for us, because we had to go back two weeks before we found a VM that did not have the issue that caused the system not to come up (there seemed to have been some sort of virus or update that got applied in that time which did not take effect until the machine restarted) Yes, all of this does add an extra layer of complexity and you end up wasting some resources, but if you compare that with the cost of doing some hardware based fault tolerance (having a second machine ready to go), this seems like an easier and less expensive way to go. Like every other decision with computers, it is going to be a tradeoff between cost and performance. -Matthew R. Learn -----Original Message----- From: Dave Watts [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 10:16 PM To: cf-server Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance > Please elaborate. Why do you say its a waste of time and money? Running VMware allows you to share physical hardware across virtual machines. If you just have one VM, you might as well just install on the physical hardware in the first place. There's a non-negligible performance overhead with virtualization. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location. Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-server/message.cfm/messageid:6796 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-server/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.10
