Well Hawro Mr. Fancy Pants

Virtualization seems to be the latest trend these days and I’m fortunate enough to get my hands on the technology so I can play around with it a little. Thanks to Dreamspark and my student status, I was able to get Windows Server 2008 Standard and Windows Server 2003 Standard for free. I’m glad to see Microsoft supporting and providing students with their software giving them the opportunity to learn.

My host operating system is running Windows 2008 Standard along with VMware’s free version of VMware Server. I believe you can get a maximum of 10 licenses when you register on their website. So far I am running 3 virtual operating systems: FreeBSD v7.0 (desolace) for the public server, FreeBSD v7.0 (dragonblight) for data related services such as MySQL, LDAP, NIS/NFS servers, and Windows XP (sourge) for media services/testing purposes. All 3 have been delegated a maximum of 1 CPU and 1GB of RAM each. All are running perfectly fine in VMware Server and I don’t notice a significant slow down on the host operating system.

The host server’s physical specs are:
- AMD Phenom 9600 Quad-Core Processor running at 2.3GHz
- 4GB of RAM (most likely going to be bumped up to 8GB soon)
- 4x 500GB SATA drives which are paired and mirrored using RAID 1.
- Gigabit Ethernet

I’m still planning on adding 2 more operating systems to the “virtual OS farm”. Possibly a Linux variant for testing and also a Windows Server 2003 installation to prepare myself for the certification exam I’m planning on taking. I can see how this type of setup can replace huge server racks. It would definitely suck less juice from the outlet, however I do think an extremely beefy host server is needed to run everything smoothly in enterprise environments.

Might just be overkill for a home network, but still, how else is one supposed to learn?