[HCoop-Discuss] Dedicated servers?

[Adam Chlipala]

These are some good reasons.

Ron Senykoff wrote:
> - You can have a standard base image that you install for any new VM.
> Basically a prebuilt lean VM waiting for you to install whatever
> software you want.
>   

Can't we achieve that for real machines, too, with regular disk images 
and some way of getting them onto machines?  There must be standard grub 
kind of tools that facilitate that.

> - It becomes much easier to isolate which application (mysql, mail,
> etc) is causing load on the system. With multiple physical servers in
> place, you can move the VMs around as appropriate to best distribute
> the load. This allows for real optimization of your hardware
> utilization.
>   

This also forces you to figure out ahead of time what resources to 
allocate to each VM, right?  If you got it wrong, do you need manual 
action to keep one VM from being resource-starved even when there are 
free resources available?


As for other disadvantages of virtualization, I can think of a few: 
Initial set-up overhead (labor-wise) is higher.  For fully-utilized 
machines, you can handle less load with virtualization than otherwise.  
Some software/hardware may work oddly with VMs.

Are there any others?