{"id":115,"date":"2009-10-15T23:29:40","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T07:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=115"},"modified":"2009-12-02T08:23:52","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T16:23:52","slug":"a-tale-of-a-server-or-how-did-i-get-a-rack-of-boat-anchors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;How did I get a rack of boat anchors?&#8221; or why you can&#8217;t afford NOT to virtualize"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wherever I have worked, there&#8217;s a lot of servers laying around that aren&#8217;t doing a whole lot.\u00a0 A fundamental benefit of virtualization is better utilization of resources.\u00a0 In a virtualized environment, you *DON&#8217;T* have a bunch of unused capacity.<\/p>\n<p>Hardware acquisitions work something like this:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>End users (with money) decide they need some software they can&#8217;t live without.<\/li>\n<li>They <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">whine<\/span> make presentations and convince the boss to buy it.<\/li>\n<li>Someone finally asks the computer geeks what it&#8217;ll take to run it. We have no idea, but don&#8217;t want to say that we don&#8217;t know.<\/li>\n<li>Since we don&#8217;t want to under specify, and the end users have money, we tell them to get the biggest damn server we think they&#8217;ll buy.<\/li>\n<li>We get the app, we load it, and they don&#8217;t really use it much.<\/li>\n<li>The Big Server sits idling at 10% used.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lather,_rinse,_repeat\">Lather, Rinse, Repeat.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s where racks of unused servers come from.<\/p>\n<h3>That&#8217;s what virtualization deals with.\u00a0 If I use a virtual machine to run your application, I can &#8220;right size&#8221; the VM, so it has exactly what it needs, but no more.\u00a0 When I use servers to host virtual machines, I can consolidate tens or dozens of applications on one server.\u00a0 Users stay happy, computer geeks are happy, the only ones not happy are the hardware vendors.<\/h3>\n<p>So don&#8217;t put an OS directly on a server.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 (I suppose there may be edge cases where you might&#8230;) Run a hypervisor like XenServer or VMware ESX on servers, and run all applications as virtual machines.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-124\" title=\"Big-FC-Server\" src=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Big-FC-Server.jpg\" alt=\"Big-FC-Server\" width=\"384\" height=\"512\" srcset=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Big-FC-Server.jpg 640w, https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Big-FC-Server-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>(That&#8217;s not me, BTW.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wherever I have worked, there&#8217;s a lot of servers laying around that aren&#8217;t doing a whole lot.\u00a0 A fundamental benefit of virtualization is better utilization of resources.\u00a0 In a virtualized environment, you *DON&#8217;T* have a bunch of unused capacity. Hardware&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=115\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}