Our servers in Dallas hosted by The Planet have been running now for almost 4 years. Our main server has been running quite well and hosting most of our sites with no issues. I am thinking it’s time to upgrade our servers.
We’ve been looking at one large beefy box running some sort of virtualization to consolidate our servers. In house, here in Vegas, we’ve been testing out Microsoft’s Virtual Server and VMWare Server. Both provide what we are looking for in terms of running what we like as guest operating systems. In terms of host operating systems, VMWare runs on Linux where as Virtual Server does not. Also, remote access capabilities for Virtual Server is slightly better than VMWare’s.
Now, I am a computer person, I do not subscribe to the end all be all belief that one OS is better than another, I believe that there is good reason for some to run Windows Server and for others Linux or Mac OSX. They all have their purpose for various situations. I believe in running the proper tools for the job.
We are a Microsoft partner and for years have done well with Microsoft’s products, but I must say, that almost all of our web apps and services are all PHP/MySQL based. (I took our MS SQL server offline almost 2 years ago) Now, PHP/MySQL sites run best in an Apache/Linux environment. So, we definitely want to have our web servers on Linux in the future. (yes, this site is running on a Windows Server host)
Moving forward, it looks like we’re going to go with Windows 2003 Server host running VMWare server. We will have all of our other servers running in a Virtual Machine. We’ll probably host the MySQL server itself on the Host OS and have the Virtual hosts access it through the network.
The reason we’re going with this decision is that most of our group knows how to work with the Microsoft environment and it will ease the transition to the new machines. This will allow us to get to our new projects faster.
