Migrate Physical Server to VM environment

[jikseyres16]

Hi Vicidial Community,

Someone ask me if they can convert/migrate their 4 Clustered (1MAIN DB&WEB, 1 SLAVE DB, 2 DIALER) Vicidial Servers into Virtual Machine environment. I don't know what to say (as I know and read on this forum that it is not advisable) but his reason is that it is costly to maintain 4 physical servers compare to 1 (powerful server, he said) server with VMs. I just need your inputs.

Thank you

[mflorell]

Of course you CAN do it, but it's not a good idea

[williamconley]

Better to convert to a "single-server-install" in the cool new hardware. (IF it will hold it. IF it won't hold it: There's no way in hell it will do better with the added overhead of the VM framework!)

Multi-server Vicidial generally uses ALL the CPU available. The conversion WILL result in a loss of CPU power (with the added overhead of the VM framework).

However: If the server is "all" vicidial, then the entire CPU will be available for Vicidial functions et Voila! But: When you hit the capacity of this hardware, you are faced with the choice of upping to even bigger/badder hardware OR adding another server to make it a cluster (yet again).

However: Tell them to feel free and test this theory and report the results. Always fun to hear the results of a Virtualization attempt.

Although they often "go silent", some claim success. But the initial claim is always backed off by a few caveats. The most recent one (which is a fully-qualified Virtualized system, similar to the ones we do use) is that each of the virtual servers is, in fact, a standalone and limited to just a couple agents. Still seriously underutilizing the hardware, but at least the servers NOT in use right now are (essentially) donating their CPU/memory to the users who ARE using their systems right now.

This is what Virtualization is for: Reclaiming unused CPU/Memory power. The overhead loss in that situation is recovered by the "overlapping unused servers". But when it's a single "system" utilizing multiple servers, that "unused cpu/memory recovery" doesn't exist, so nothing is gained. Just the loss of the VM software.