[Info-vax] VMware

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/10/2019 3:48 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 12/10/2019 2:45 AM, IanD wrote:
>> Dave, no shame coming from the 80's, the only shame is to refuse to 
>> want to even entertain a different world, you hardly seem like someone 
>> who refuses to look at the newer world, you just want proof that it's 
>> better, totally understandable
>>
>> I assume you downloaded and had a tinker with virtualbox and saw how 
>> easy it was to spin up an OS and configure it and play with it versus 
>> real hardware
> 
> Yep.  Played with VirtualBox.  Was going to have an instance for various 
> old versions of WEENDOZE.  Not all were so easy.  Had problems with 
> networking.  I will quite likely use VirtualBox for running x86 VMS.

There are two somewhat different scenarios for virtualization:
1) guest OS in real OS host - this is used for developers to
    run a few different OS on their development PC
2) guest OS in hypervisor host - this is used in production
    with often a large number of VM's per physical box

>> VMware is the same but on steroids. It has management functionally 
>> built in that allows the management of 1000's of instances. You can do 
>> funky thinks like create resource pools and manage multiple instance 
>> as though they were a single entity etc
> 
> I just don't see applications that I'm familiar with running in 1000 
> instances of the OS.

They do not need to be instances of the same application or OS.

You can have one ESXi server running VM's:
* Linux with Apache web server and PHP for company web site
* Linux with MySQL used by web site
* VMS with the business application
* Windows with Exchange for company email
* Windows for file shares and printers
* Windows for domain controller
etc.

If you need redundancy in single data center then you will have
2 ESXi servers both with all VM's (unless you use VMotion as discussed).

If you need redundancy in redundant data centers then you will
have 2 ESXi servers in each data center.

And that is still for a pretty small company.

For a larger company you may run many business applications.

Some applications may come with many different types of servers
like tradition web + app + DB.

And some server types may need multiple instances to handle
load - like 4 or 8 web servers.

It adds up quickly.

Arne