On May 27, 2011, at 2:33 PM, James B. Byrne wrote: > Why would a small company not in the public hosting business choose > to employ VM technology? What are the benefits over operating > several individual small form factor servers or blades instead? Well, we do virtualization for an unusual reason here. We do it to reduce RFI, since we're a radio astronomy observatory. 15 VM's on a pair of largish hosts generates much less interference than 15 physical boxes with less effective shielding.... Also, virtualization allows rapid changes in provisioning of storage and other resources. It also allows rapid 're-imaging' for emergency rollback of the whole guest. It also allows virtualization-based HA to work. And, most importantly, it allows you to spread the cost of multiple guests to one or two more reliable and more capable boxes; 2 Dell PE6950's (or equivalent four-socket multicore capable servers) is going to cost less than 15 two or one RU boxes with equivalent redundancy and reliability). Plus, I don't have to buy more hardware to provision another server, especially if it is a low-performance-requirement guest. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 1813 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20110527/b321135c/attachment-0004.p7s>