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Billy Moon
Asked: 2012-03-21 02:10:35 +0800 CST

Deciding to use VM or native install for new hardware

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I have a Ubuntu 10.10 installation running on hardware. I upgraded the hardware, and am planning to move the system over. Whilst reading the many various ways to do this, I came across tools for making a virtual machine out of a hardware installation. I think this might make managing my server easier in the future if I run it as a virtual machine. Also, I will be able to easily split responsibilities of my server, for example running MySQL on a separate virtual machine hosted on the same physical machine.

Is it a good idea to install my production server as a virtual machine inside another thin server installation?

What are the pros/cons and pitfalls?

ubuntu virtual-machines

2 Answers

  1. Virtualbox is really more of a "virtualize a workstation" type solution than a serious "I want to run a server in a VM" solution.

    If you want to run a real VM solution I'd suggest running VMWare ESXi (free) or Hyper-V on the hardware, if your system supports it. Be aware you'll need a Windows workstation to run the vSphere control console for VMWare; I'm not sure off the top of my head what Hyper-V requires for management.

    Going with a true hypervisor solution will incur less overhead on your host system, and leave more resource space for the guest VM's.

    Virtualbox is better for playing with an OS or situations that call for "I need to run MS Office but I'm running Ubuntu." It works okay, but if you manage servers 24/7 or need to run multiple machines concurrently, it's foolish to shoehorn it into Virtualbox rather than run a bare hypervisor for the job.

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  2. Best Answer

    Go for VM
    but go for something like XEN this will perform much better than VBOX on Ubuntu

    Pros:

    • Flexibility - that's pretty obvious
    • TESTING - you'll be able to test soft on new machines earlier that competitors using native hwd installations ;)
    • Education
      • you'll learn more this way about various systems and virtualization of course
      • Easier to play with clusters
    • easier to maintain Cluster power - resources distribution
    • choose best OS for particular tasks (SQL db, file server, high frequency calculations - BSD has much better context switching that Linux kernel, L4 kernels have outstanding IPC...)

    Cons:

    • performance drop-down ; additional OS (hypervisor) layer brings big overhead - it gets worse with OS(native ubuntu)+VM+OS

    Here's a more comprehensive list of recommended hypervisors:

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