Hey guys, I'm setting up a small server for an office and I'd like to have control beyond the operating system itself plus split it between 2-3 OS, such as a couple of database specific guest OS, and a domain controller as well.

Only way I thought about doing it was visualizing, honestly I hardly have any experience with it but given the circumstances setting up multiple virtual servers seems to be the best option.

They use a variety of different softwares, the current server is bloated and running everything on it's own, I'm talking about a domain controller, virtual desktops, exchange server, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird and still, for some odd reason they also have a dedicated sendmail server.

A couple of colleges criticized me saying I'd have another problem to deal with, the host itself. For me it seems practical and safe. So is it doable? Is it a good idea?

Thanks!

I think you may be putting all your eggs in one basket, but if they can live with the risk I see no issues. The host will need to be fairly chunky to handle this though - you've basically got 4 databases so disk access could be a bottleneck unless you add a decent storage backend.

Personally I'd want 2 big hosts with a shared storage backend so you can migrate vm's around to spread the load.

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Yeah I know, currently it's all being driven by a Opteron 175, 8GB Ram and two desktop class 250GB hdds in raid1 running Windows 2003 64bit. Very slow, unreliable and bloated.

The new server will be a custom built Core I7 with 32GB Ram, I haven't decided about the storage yet but I'm looking into SSDs for the databases, I don't believe I'll be hitting a bottleneck if I do it right. There will also a NAS for offsite backup.

I know the way I'm doing it will have zero redundancy in case of a hardware failure but I'm moving them from dirty water to wine, and it's not likely they do have any at this moment. Splitting the servers between multiple virtual machines seems very practical and having regular snapshots of them would be perfect. Some of their software support requires remote access to the local server for maintaining/updating, having different isolated machines would greatly increase the security/privacy.

I'm currently playing around with Xen which has pleased me so far but should I also give KVM a try?

Just as a personal opinion I'd avoid xen, the majority of distro's dumped it due to the fact that the kernel changes were fairly invasive - KVM is my choice for virtualisation.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just as a personal opinion I'd avoid xen, the majority of distro's dumped it due to the fact that the kernel changes were fairly invasive - KVM is my choice for virtualisation.

1 members found this post helpful.