i have to say, wow where were you all my life. at work i had 4 domain servers (2 domains) 2 file servers, one app server and exchange all on separate boxes. ive now got 2 vmware boxes. each hosting a domain controller for each of the domains, and each has a file server. so now im down to 2 vm boxes , the app server and exchange in 2 weeks i went from 8 to 4 physical boxes on the rack!

Yah, I don't mind it. I used it at my old job. Back then I used to write macros to run on a PC basically eliminating someone's job. The thing is, the PC had to be basically dedicated to running that specific macro because we ran a lot through out the day and night and human users would interfere with the macro.

Then we got the idea of running VMware and putting about 2-3 extra VM sessions on each pc to run more macros. It was at that point when Skynet gain consciousness and I moved on looking for another job. It was okay while it lasted.

I was going to throw it on a box here at home soon too. Sometimes I don't to dedicate a physical box to 'doing stupid shit'.

Combine VMWare Server with master copies of a hard drive, and extra physical capacity, and you have down-resistant servers with easy-to-boost capacity. Virtualization is good stuff.

I'm migrating a few SharePoint farms into to VMware ESX instances right now. I don't manage the ESX servers, but I used to manage the Workstation client and the 4 VM images that we had deployed to about 400 workstations. That eventually became rather annoying, since we had to patch the fuckers too, which is hard when they only come online intermittently, and have the capability to Revert.

In general, I love VMware. I started using it back at version 0.9 in 1999.

im running it on top of Centos. seems to work well. if any of you manage some networks for small places (i have as a 'customer' a charity, they have no server but needed backups. I set up backuppc for them to backup the desktops. works VERY well.

if you want some awesome virtualivation try Proxmox, It kicks some serious virtualization ass.

JC

Posted by nostra-YOUPPI! i have to say, wow where were you all my life. at work i had 4 domain servers (2 domains) 2 file servers, one app server and exchange all on separate boxes. ive now got 2 vmware boxes. each hosting a domain controller for each of the domains, and each has a file server. so now im down to 2 vm boxes , the app server and exchange in 2 weeks i went from 8 to 4 physical boxes on the rack!

be careful with your time synchronization. having all your DC's VMed seems to not be best practice from what i can tell.

oh not to worry my dc that is the schema master/dns/dhcp is a baremetal box

I just started using VMWare Fusion on my Mac to run XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu virtual machines and I fully agree; this is wonderful! Especially with Windows. It works fine with Linux but you don't really get its full power since VMWare Tools and Unity Mode don't work.

I know you all are talking about using it for servers which is a little different to what I'm doing, but seriously, VMWare is some wonderful software.

Randomly LOL vmware related:

My employer is on pain in the ass Novell networking. I developed an issue where my user profile changes don't get stored when I log off and windows creates a new blank profile upon logging in again.

Worked through 3 levels of company tech support. I'm in project mgmt, so we tech support don't mingle much. The 3rd tech (an older women) remoted my PC (with no warning mind you) and saw that I was in the process of uninstalling vmware via add/rem programs.

While we do have admin access locally to add/rem software as needed, she told me that "I shouldn't be in there deleting things". LOL WTF? I told her that I knew exactly what program I was uninstalling (I didn't need it on this machine any more) and it's not a problem.

Then 15 minutes later while she deletes my profile folders and has me reboot for the 50th time only to find the problem persists, she again told me I shouldn't be deleting things and that might might be the cause.

Yah...because deleting vmware is messing up my user profile.

I'm pretty sure she:
-Doesn't know what vmware is/does.
-Didn't recognize the name of the software, so in her eyes I was then deleting something important.
-Thinks I fucked up my own computer even though I was at 9 month uptime on an XP box and my downtime was because I had to move my desk for a new carpet.

Sorry, just had to rant and it reminded me of this thread.