Power is one of the reasons virtualization appeals to me - I used to use about 10 machines as different servers and probably none of them ran at full capacity. Now I've got 3 virtualization servers on the rack running about 15 virtual machines so I'm making more efficient use of the hardware and still have more capacity for future stuff. The other benefit is that before if a machine failed I'd have to reinstall that machine from scratch, now if I get a new machine it takes about an hour to set it up as a generic virtualization server and then I can move existing stuff onto it without a big fuss.
Rackmount computer cabinet
- Thread starter sprior
- Start date
It's a combination of a few factors. The servers are for personal use, I'm not running a business out of my house. I'm a full time programmer with computers as my main hobby. I wrote a home automation system so there are things (like cameras) I don't allow access to outside my private network and the servers manage that. The NAS is the central store for data in the house (family photos, movies, music) and I don't need all that traffic going to the Internet, though the most critical things on my NAS are backed up regularly to Amazon Glacier. One of my virtual machines is a Windows Home Server so all the client computers in the house back up nightly to the server. I'm even running a PBX for the house in a VM with voice recognition and integration to the home automation system which wouldn't be practical over the Internet.
But I also like to fire up a new VM to try out some software I want to learn (Nagios network monitoring is one of those at the moment) and I wouldn't do that as much if I was incurring an additional monthly fee. It's amazing how often weird stuff I played with at home ends up being just what is needed at my day job, the educational spinoff of my goofing around is well worth it.
But I also like to fire up a new VM to try out some software I want to learn (Nagios network monitoring is one of those at the moment) and I wouldn't do that as much if I was incurring an additional monthly fee. It's amazing how often weird stuff I played with at home ends up being just what is needed at my day job, the educational spinoff of my goofing around is well worth it.
