News.com.com is reporting that VMware (makers of the popular virtualization products VMware Workstation, GSX Server, and ESX Server) is expected to announce early next week that they will be releasing the GSX Server software for FREE! This is awesome news for those of us who are interested being able to run multiple servers/OSs on a single box. I've been wanting to do this for a while now... a few of my plans are to:
- Test drive some of the latest Linux distros.
- Have a true Test Server for developing subText on. This will allow me to change the configuration of the server (i.e.- install/remove certain components like SQLDMO) and make sure that subText still runs correctly.
- Test out some of the newest MS Windows builds (read: Vista and Longhorn Server).
- A test bed for developing ASP.NET 2.0 applications and also for converting existing 1.1 app over to 2.0.
- Consolidate the two physically seperate servers I have now (1 - Web/FTP/File/SSH/remoteAccess and 2 - Database/Antivirus/backup) onto a single piece of hardware via virtualization.*
- ....
- Profit!
OK, so #6 was a /. joke... but in all honesty there are so many possibilities for this great tool. I can't wait to try it out!
* = This will be huge as I can split the servers up even more so that I can take one (or more) offline and the others will remain up. I also see some power savings. However, I do realize that I'll have to take into consideration the performance loss I will suffer from putting all of this on a single box. The good thing about my situation is that right now the two physical server boxes are running on really old (Pentium II & III) desktop hardware, and I have a nice P4 workstation that will soon become available when my new AMD Turion laptop arrives! So I expect any performance hits to be negligible.
UPDATE:
VMware has officially announced
VMware Server and you can download the
Beta here. I also noticed that they have a huge
list of pre-built virtual machines and virtual appliances that are ready to run on your new Virtual Server.