On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com> wrote:
Does the overhead of virtualization make sense for small organizations? We have various applications running on two physical servers and run into the situation where two or more applications need Apache so configuration of one potentially interferes with configuration of another. And likewise, upgrades or maintenance of one application require the server to be taken offline for a while, cutting off access to others.
Can it make sense to virtualize so that each application has its own OS instance, which can be powered on and off, upgraded, etc. independently, for a small business?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, needing to separate two applications that don't play nice with each other is a great use case for putting each app in its own VM.
It looks like VMWare's vSphere Essentials would run us $500 or so a year, is it worth it to pay that? What's the best alternative as a bare-metal hypervisor, Xen? KVM is a no-go because we have to be able to do Windows servers, too.
The Windows requirement is unfortunate, because if it was strictly Linux, I'd say you would be able to get servers from Digital Ocean or Linode for as little as $5/month and go from there.
Amazon Web Services costs a little more, but they do offer Windows instances: https://aws.amazon.com/ A Windows VM with 8 GB of RAM and 2 CPUs will run you 12.08 cents per hour. That's a little costlier than Linode and Digital Ocean, but they also offer a free tier for the first year so you can try out the service.
Not that there's anything wrong with VMWare, but using the solutions I mentioned means you don't have to set up and configure physical servers, and only pay for what you use.
-- Doug
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