Positive Fedora Vibes

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Sat, 2006-10-07 at 14:01 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On 10/7/06, Christopher A. Williams <chrisw01 at comcast.net> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-10-07 at 16:26 +0100, Andy Green wrote:
> >
> > > And then there's this:
> > >
> > > http://smallbusiness.itworld.com/4383/nls_networking061005/pfindex.html
> > >
> > > ''...I estimate each Vista user will cost your company between $3,250
> > > and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. ...''
> >
> > <snip...>
> >
> > I'm also a regional practice lead for virtualization technology (mainly
> > VMware and Virtual Iron) for my company. I've been having a great time
> > ribbing our MS liaison in the office about the fact that our lab runs
> > all of the Office 2K7, Longhorn and Vista stuff on VMware Server hosted
> > on Fedora Core 5 without so much as a hiccup. We're going to upgrade to
> > VI3 next week, but will still keep 1 server as Fedora and VMware Server
> > to run a few things.
> ><snip...>
> >
> 
> How's running Fedora in a production environment working out for you?
> What version do you use?

This server is actually part of our development and testing lab, but we
rely on it as if it were production. It's a dual-processor Proliant
DL380 with 4GB RAM running Fedora Core 5 with VMware Server 1.0.1 and
routinely hosts around 5 virtual machines of Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL
Server 2005 and Longhorn. The Windows Server VMs all have at least 512MB
RAM allocated to them (Longhorn needs more) and we've never exceeded 50%
average CPU and RAM utilization with 5 of them running at once.

The system itself has been extremely stable - the worst problem we've
had was that, after remotely rebooting for a kernel upgrade, it stopped
at the infamous "Press F1 to continue" BIOS prompt and wound up staying
down until the next day when someone was in the office. Next biggest was
when one of our developers decided to clone and launch about 10 VMs and
chewed up all of the remaining disk. He complained about system
performance until I explained that he was trying to run more than 12 VMs
with heavy RAM allocations on a 4GB box. Even then, it was just slow. It
didn't crash or show any signs of errors and things sped back up again
after he shut a few unneeded VMs down.

My only issue with running Fedora in production environments has to do
with the rapidness of updates. It's not as big a problem for clients,
but you tend to batch things up with servers since you want to not have
things potentially down every couple of days for changes. But by
delaying the updates for longer periods, you wind up with a larger
number of more significant changes all at once. That means test, test,
test!!! Otherwise, it can be a bit risky.

Beyond that, we're very satisfied with the performance and reliability
overall. As I said, we're satisfied enough to be able to constantly rib
our MS relationship manager...! <grin>

Cheers,

Chris

-- 
======================
"Never murder a man when he's
busy committing suicide."

-- Woodrow Wilson