My friend Josh Carlisle was kind enough to host this website during my move to California. Josh set me up with a Microsoft Virtual Server slice of Windows 2003 Standard on his Xeon 2.8 server. I'm currently running a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, Perl) configuration which I was able to set up remotely without issue.
I would agree in part to your experience with Virtual Server. Under normal situations I would not host a production environment on a virtual server for a variety of reasons but it does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours.
Saying that I still believe that a majority (not all for sure) of your experience with Virtual Server has a good bit to do with my configuration. First off there is ALOT on that server which is a big no-no for a virtual server environment. Second you’re on an older ATA100 IDE drive and lastly I haven’t disabled hyperthreading which throws off the internal CPU balancing mechanisms in virtual server (it thinks you’re on dual processor server - which you are… just minus the second processor lol).
I have felt your pain during the installs, it was PAINFULLY slow, however I havn’t experienced any general slowness when accessing the site but then again I’m also not posting anything 
If I had to do it again I’d like to see the experience with:
I’ll look forward to finding out at least in part what the difference is when I get my new server in next month and pull some stuff off of my poor server :).
I don’t have any experience with VMWare but my last shop had high regards for it and we used it for several of our development environments. I do agree with you jeff though that VM technology in general is moving in the right direction but it’s not quite there yet.
does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours
Yep, and it’s working very well for me, my impatience notwithstanding 
I also read that Intel (and presumably AMD) are including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well. That should help.
does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours
Yep, and it’s working very well for me, my impatience notwithstanding
I also read that Intel (and presumably AMD) are including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well. That should help.
including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well
Er, this should read FUTURE cpu hardware:
a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040912113927.html"http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040912113927.html/a
I wonder if there are any articles out there comparing Microsofts Virtual PC and VMWare… I’ve run both VM Workstation 4 on my laptop and we have a VM ESX server (running on top of Red Hat). I realize VMWare is probably out of your budget and the ESX server surely is but it is proof that virtual machines can perform well…
Our current ESX server is spliced up into about 5 virtual machines. A few of them run Sharepoint sites, a few are IIS, and a few Win2k3 servers for development/testing purposes.
The ESX server is awesome. It’s performance is fantastic and none of the “virtual boxes” have had any downtime as of yet (going on 5 months since we deployed).
We’re even thinking of deploying an entire engineering platform on the VM Ware ESX server for our locations in China and Europe. Get a highly redundant server and you have a “one box solution”. Keep images handy of your PDM system, your Orcale9i server, a webserver, etc. and easily deploy it anywhere in the world just by flipping a switch! Sounds cool in our heads atleast
Of course, as a privately held company which grossed a little over $500mill last year we probably have a touch larger IT budget