Virtual Machines are a great way at hosting multiple services, and keeping your overall costs low.
Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors full capacity.
Game play will use more of that processor usage, but that doesn’t really come into question in the server environment.
So, just about many of the servers out there are very capable of having additional virtual servers added to them, and with the price of disk space falling, virtualization technologies are very much viable.
I run Virtual Server here at my home, and it hosts my linux test environment, this is to save me booting between OS and also allows me to have computing resources available to me simultaneously.
So, I don’t need a second server running, I don’t need to pay for extra hardware, power, or anything like that, when I want to run the linux machine (and we use it often enough anyway).
One common issue with Virtual Server Linux Virtual Machines is the clock being out of sync and audio style resources skipping ahead or behind in the established virtual machine.
The fix to that is a combination of setting ‘clock=pit’ as a boot parameter, and also installing virtual machine additions.
If you run a CentOS distro though, installing Virtual Machine additions as recommended doesn’t work as expected.
The reason for this is, the ./install.sh script looks for a string in the /etc/redhat-release file.
The string it is looking for is the third one. So, on Red Hat (where CentOS is derived) it would be “release” – Red Hat Release.
On CentOS however, it is “final” – CentOS release final.
The fix to this? Couldn’t be simpler.
nano into /etc/redhat-release, and between CentOS, add a space, so it might read Cent OS release.
Make sure you have the kernel sources (yum install kernel-devel), and that will allow the virtual machine additions to install, and once installed, leave as is, or just change it back.
Use Virtual Machines, there really isn’t much going against them, they save power, they allow you to have the extra resource available (ie. Linux system) as well as your Windows machine.
And, Virtual Server is one of Microsoft’s good releases, it’s a great setup for virtualization, nothing silly like VMWare, just straight forward virtual machines.
Enjoy!