Filed under: Enterprise, Xserve, Apple
Turn your Xserve into two machines
Not literally, of course, but Tom Yager writes that he has been able to replace two of his Windows servers with one Xserve, running Windows 2003. How has he accomplished this feat? By the good graces of Parallels Desktop and the wonders of virtualization. Tom promises to give more details about his setup, but he claims that the 3 servers running on his Xserve (one OS X, 2 Windows 2003) are smokin'.
Tom Yager is a big fan of the Xserve, but I have to wonder about the wisdom of running enterprise level software in a consumer oriented virtualization product. I know I wouldn't be comfortable running any mission critical servers in Parallels since it is missing many enterprise level options that industrial strength virtualization solutions offer, and rightfully so. Parallels is working on a server version of their software, though I don't know if they plan on supporting OS X. Their website mentions running Windows, Linux, OS/2 or FreeBSD on the host machine, though they don't say what OS the host machine has to run.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
brad said 3:15AM on 12-22-2006
I have tested, and continue to run in a production setting, two instances of Windows 2003 Server hosted by Parallels Desktop...
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Scott McNulty said 8:34PM on 12-21-2006
You are a braver man than I, Brad.
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deda said 9:47PM on 12-21-2006
Another reason this is a bad idea is that Mac OS X is fairly bloated when it comes to serving Virtual Machines. The host operating system should be as lean as possible. If you are running other services on the host server, and something crashes, it has the potential to bring every Virtual Machine down with it.
I run VMWare server in production environments. They are hosted on Linux boxes which have no extraneous services running on them, no Graphical environment, and the only services running are those required to run VMware Server.
In addition, other virtualization products have utilities which make management of your Virtual Machines easy. You can use command line tools and scripts to check the health, suspend, power on Virtual Machines. In my few weeks of using Parallels on my MBP, I haven't come across and command line utilities.
This story definitely falls in to the category of neat, but not something a responsible sys admin would do in production.
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anon said 1:39PM on 12-22-2006
I would not rely on Xservers for production. The one (G5) machine and drive array that we used had a higher then acceptable drive failure rate. (As in: higher then the Dell sitting next to it.) At the time Apple used drives that were designed for desktop use not server use.
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henrrrik said 9:22AM on 12-22-2006
Brave indeed.
I would get a separate linux box and run the two Windows servers on that using Xen or VMware Server.
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