In the lab I needed to bring up a machine to:
- Act as production file server
- Assist in testing virtual technologies
- Be reliable
The last point was the most important. To that end, I wanted to put together a solution that gave me the flexibility to meet those requirements but not consume all of the test gear in the lab.
What I came up with was a new server running Debian and VMware Server. You might be thinking, VMware Server! Why on earth would he choose a hosted virtualization solution? The answer is simple, read requirement 2 from above and last sentence from above. VMware Server allows me to accomplish all of my requirements, and specifically addresses those areas. Some may wonder why a simple ESX 3/3i install would not work. It would, but I would loose out on some of the flexibility that I wanted from a hosted solution.
Case in point..bare with me, this could get complicated. Let’s say that I want to use some of my ESX lab boxes and play around with NFS datastores (and our favorite lab filer has been checked out). This new server will allow me to serve a couple of NFS exports (on the host) to the lab for testing while not consuming additional hardware. Sure, sharing a single box for multiple tasks like this may degrade performance if tests are running against the NFS datastores and someone is attempting to access data on the file server. 9 times out of 10 this is not going to be the case. And really, aren’t we all trying to do more with less now days?
Going through this scenario has made me think back to my VCP studies and remember some of the situations in which VMware recommended customers use GSX/VMware Server. As it turns out, I’ve turned out to be one of those unsuspecting customers.
