[CentOS] Virtualization as cheap redundancy option?

[Ross Walker]

On Jun 28, 2010, at 11:15 AM, Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com> wrote:

> On 6/28/2010 7:59 AM, guillaume wrote:
>> Why would one use vmware Server 2.x when ESXi is available free of
>> charge, stable, small footprint, ... ?
> 
> I've thought about it, but it's not really the right thing for us.
> 
> Our VM host has some special hardware in it, driven by custom software 
> which runs just fine in the host OS, but which doesn't work through 
> virtualization because VMware doesn't know about this class of hardware.
> 
> This server is idle much of the time, so it made sense to give it 
> secondary duty as a VM host.  To switch to ESXi, we'd have to bring up a 
> separate server (wasteful) and let the current one go back to being idle 
> much of the time (doubly wasteful).

Then give VirtualBox a whirl.

Fully supported, works and some say performs better then VMware Server.

-Ross