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Luke
Asked: 2011-10-01 09:29:43 +0800 CST

Virtualize server environment for development?

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We're in the planning/development stage for our new platform and with everything separated out we'll need to setup between 9 to 16 servers, a load balancer, 2 or 3 hardware firewalls, and a VPN.

During development we need to simulate all of this as cheaply as possible. Ideally I'd like to be able to setup a single machine with a lot of RAM and virtualize all of this to figure out what works and what doesn't.

What are my better options as far as virtualization? VMWare? Other? How can I virtualize all the appliances as well?

The appliances our data center offers: Cisco ASA 5510 (firewall), Foundry FCSLB8 Serveriron XL (load balancer)

(We'll be running CentOS 6 64bit on our servers)

Looking for something super easy. Something that will help me learn the real environment for later on.

virtualization centos

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are virtual load balancers that you can load into hypervisors like VMware so that you can have a software load balancer running. It won't be running the same software as the ServerIron device you are looking at, but it'll get the job done. The same goes for the firewall.

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  2. I dont think you'll be able to virtualize the the appliances but you can likely find something that you can virtualize to perform the same functions.

    As for Virtualizing the servers I'm a big fan of Hyper-V but any of the big name hypervisors will do nicely and a lot of the smaller ones will probably do what you want as well.

    Really it sounds like you just need to settle on a hypervisor and spec out some hardware. Personally I'd go with something along the lines of an HP ML350 some Western Digital RE4 drives and a boatload of ram.

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  3. You can use any full virtualization solution like xen, kvm, VMware, Hyper-V. Some applications can be virtualized using a container based solution: openvz, solaris containers... It depends on the application and the OS to chose the virtualization solution.

    You can emulate Cisco equipments with GNS3

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  4. To truly do what you are asking you will need an actual replication of the equipment that will be used.

    Otherwise if you use Virtualbox or VMWare for your development virtualization but then use Xen in production, that could introduce a set of issues that you aren't prepared for because you didn't know about them.

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