Due to server hardware refresh coming at work, I am investigating routes which we can take, one of the new ones is going virtual. It has couple of advantages like High Availability, and Fail Over which are very important these days ( users complain if their services are not available 100% )

So far I have covered VMWare Server and Infrastructure products. Where I like features of Infrastructure and price and ease of use of Server.

Now it’s time for XEN. From the beginning it looks very bare. Not like entirely integrated VMWare software, XEN is just the basic core and you need tools to use it and these come in plenty. Now I am playing with what came shipped with OpenSuSe. But just now I’ve briefly read on ganeti and I am impressed.

Linux KVM, hmm, I don’t have much to say for it. From what I’ve seen it’s not good for hosting MS Windows guest systems.

SAN

This is kinda strange, I know what are they, how they work, even used it in some testing. But I never had opportunity to work with a real, expensive solution. So far, Compellent is looking like the sort of things which I might consider installing. The only thing which worries me is license cost as well as resilience of a controller. If I have half a dozen servers connected to that bastard, they all die with it.

Routing

I am also in the router/firewall upgrade bucket. Choice is hard here, part of me wants a Cisco and the other one wants something cheaper but as good as Cisco. No part of me wants a Juniper, they are cheaper but from what I have seen they are awkward to work with. I’ve came across Vyatta, looks solid and as I am testing it, I can not find any limitations which would cross it out. But I don’t like it’s name, it does not flow on the keyboard right ( definitely not as well as my yllq )