Re: Virtualization vs. sharing a server

Ramiro,

I don't know why virtualization is considered a no-no.  We use VMware ESX.  On some smaller applications we run both the application and database on the virutal machine.  We've not had a issue with this combination in 5+ years.  We also have 6 images that run on 2 machines just for the appliations.  Each of these 5 machines is running Windows 2003 Server with Citrix XenAPP.  We do have 2 database servers that are running 2 Quad Cores Intel processors, one with 32 gig and one with 64 gig.  We also have a couple of old PIII 1 Gig machines running as our AD servers.

Each of the database servers are currently running SQL Anywhere 9 and MSSQL 2005.  We've never had a issue.  We keep one server (64 Gig one) as our primary server and the other as a hot backup with auto failover.

If it were not for the virtualized application machines we would have had to purchase quite a bit more hardware.  Since these are all quad core with 32 gig running Windows 2003 64 bit, we can run about 100 users concurrently on each application server before we start to see a strain.

In the past 5 years we've had one time when (when we only 2 physical servers) and we lost one and the other was able to handle all of the application needs although much more slowly.

I think that the success of virutalization is like anything else, having the right people to set it up.  We have no one in our compay to do this kind of thing so we contract it out to others with platinum certifications from the various vendors (Citrix/ Windows Servers and VMWare). 

When we finish our commerical application to production we will probably contract with EnterpriseDB to help us with tuning Postgres and the servers they run on.

Best Regards