As a slight diversion from the straightforward web design posts that I normally write - I am going to hit a technical one here! I have posted tweets on the Mediasmith UK Twitter page about a small virtualisation project with VMWare's ESXi 4.0, but for the technically minded (aka geeks!) here's the lowdown.

We have been running 2 servers for development for some time now. The original one, a HP ML350 Dual P3 1GHz with 2.1Gb RAM and 3 x 36.4Gb 10k hard drives has been suffering a little bit of late with some fairly hefty site rebuilding duties, resulting in a reboot each time the scripts have run, and so it was time to take some pressure off and put it all onto the new server. The new server incidentally is a HP ML150 G5 with a Xeon Quad-core 2GHz processor, 6Gb RAM and 3 x 146Gb 15k hard drives. For some reason it did ship with a low end RAID controller though which could only handle RAID 0 or RAID 1; meaning that for the past months it has only been running with 146Gb capacity and with a hot spare drive.

The first thing to do was fix this situation and I found a new HP Smart Array P800 RAID controller on eBay at a very reasonable price. After performing 2 backups (one online and one offline - you can never be too careful) of the data on the ML 150, I installed the new RAID beast. Beast being the operative word! I have never seen a RAID card come online so fast. Oh and one press of a button and it set up the RAID array in the correct manner. We now had 298Gb in a RAID 5 array, on a much more powerful controller - awesome.

Having been a little bit skeptical of this whole virtualisation malarky I had previously run a quick test on a HP ML115 which coped OK, and it seemed easy enough to set up using ESXi 4. I proceeded to setup ESXi on the ML150 and sure enough a few minutes later it was ready to install the virtual machines. One of the beauties of ESXi is that it allows you to set the number of cores available (if you have a multicore processor), the amount of RAM and disk space for each VM (Virtual Machine). This is in a free and easy to use package. My one gripe is the VMWare Go is still a bit hit and miss as to whether it will work correctly, and downloading vSphere from the ESXi server is a much more robust option to set the VMs up.

Firstly came the domain controller / file server. It doesn't require much power, but plenty of disk space. ESXi allows you to set this up. 1 core @ 2GHz, 2Gb RAM and 150Gb of disk space to be precise. Try buying a server with that oddball spec! The DC was up in no time with File server role added, and running way faster than the resources I had allowed it suggested it might. Then came the application server which is running ASP.NET, SQL Server 2008 and the 3CX phone system with the 3 cores, 4Gb RAM and 85Gb disk space. The application server is also a Certificate Server as one of our requirements for the virtualisation was to have an externally accessible server and a non-accessible one, with SSL connection to the accessible one. ESXi allowed us to do this. Both VMs are running exceptionally well, in fact better than might be expected of 2 physical machines of their specs. Moving forward we can now say that virtualisation will definitely be an option for some clients, depending on their current hardware, to support our web applications. And after looking at Hyper-V, I have to admit, although we love Microsoft, it's the VMWare product that holds the big cards. Quicker to install, a smaller footprint, a doddle to manage and still free - it is a fantastic product.