My big project for the weekend has been moving my humble lil web hosting setup to a separated out, virtualized environment. We’re doing this at work and have been very happy with the results.
My original plan was to use KVM for the virtualization, so I could take advantage of paravirtualization. Supposedly it is much faster than a fully virtualized machine, but requires newer hardware… anyway, shouldn’t be an issue, I’m using an AMD X2 4400 which has AMD-V built it.
So I spend an hour installing everything on a fresh install of Hardy 8.04 only to realize that I couldn’t take advantage of paravirtualization because my motherboard didn’t even give an option to turn on AMD-V. Further, I found that KVM’s networking is screwy, especially when bridging connections.
Another hour of deciding what to do and I decided it was best to go with the good old VMware Server solution. Ended up creating three virtual machines, a Git server, web server, and a MySQL server. I’m really excited to experiment optimizing each spoke in my web stack, and I can easily back everything up, or setup other development servers quickly and easily.
I’m pretty happy with it and am glad to have it up and running. It’s totally nerdy and I love it.
