[CentOS] New to VM

[Les Mikesell]

David Milholen wrote:
> Ok,
>  So the idea on VM is to have plenty of Drive space?

Not space so much as independently-seeking heads.  Every process on every 
virtual/real machine that shares a physical drive is going to have its own idea 
about where the head is supposed to be at the moment and you end up waiting as 
they fight over it.

> Please excuse my 
> obvious lack of knowledge on VM but I am so old school just having a 
> single server with just a few drives only running a few
> Apps like Httpd,mysqld,qmt-plus and dns.
> I have managed these for so long on just a couple of machines but 
> technology is changing and we are growing as a company and I have heard 
> and read great things that can be done with VM.

On a small scale there are only a couple of advantages.  You can take advantage 
of more powerful hardware by migrating older systems to fewer boxes, maintaining 
the old setup and IP addresses, and the virtual machines can be moved around to 
different physical hosts without much regard to hardware differences.

> I have another ibm Eserver with a couple of scsi 15k 50GB drives and 4 
> GB of memory that I can configure from scratch to do VM or what ever I need.
>  I guess I should start by asking how VM is configured and How does 
> allocate resources on the server?

I mostly use VMware Server, but the systems were set up before the ESXi product 
was free.  Starting over, I'd install ESXi on the bare metal, then whatever you 
want as guests.  You do need a windows machines to run the console client for 
ESXi, though.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmiksell at gmail.com