[K12OSN] Thinking about virtualization

[Les Mikesell]

Carl Keil wrote:

>> On a small
>> home network that's probably not the case and you might be able to run
>> all your services on the same system - or run the things you use less
>> often under vmware with the centos-based k12ltsp as the host.
>>
> 
> Anyway, I really don't want to go this way.  Out of all my servers, the
> K12LTSP one is the one that winds up needing a reboot or troubleshooting
> most often. 

That's a solvable problem unless you have hardware issues that vmware 
won't fix either.  Especially with the Centos-based versions, k12ltsp 
should never need a reboot except when you update the kernel.  I have 
one of the RH7.3 based versions that is approaching a 4 year uptime (the 
uptime counter has rolled a couple of times, though).

> I seriously don't blame K12LTSP for this, I think it's just a
> factor that it's basically being used as a 5-way workstation, so it's
> subject to more vagueries of existence.  I also tend to install new stuff
> on it more often, etc.  I often trade uptime for more features, etc. on
> this box.

Vmware makes a great place to test new stuff...

> I want to virtualize mainly to save money.  I want to lower my power bill
> and I've got vast quantities of unused clock cycles and storage space
> being unused on computers that are spun up all the time.  My K12LTSP disk
> is 10% full, while my web/mp3 server is 60%, etc.

K12ltsp is perfectly capable of being a web/samba (etc.)server too.

> I'll think more about what you're suggesting though.

The most overhead on vmware will be in disk access so I'd try to keep 
the most disk-intensive thing native.  Also, if your k12ltsp is the dhcp 
server for everything else, you probably want it running first.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com