Uncorrupted: Now taking advantage of virtualized infrastructure

Yup, I’ve done what I always wanted to do… I’ve virtualized Uncorrupted. This was my goal from the begening, but I the servers I purchased did not support it… or so I thought. The Dell Servers I have are dual processor machines, but are single core and do not have the virtualization technology built it. One day, after pulling a server from the rack I decided to see what would happen if I tried installing XenServer on it. To my surprise the installation went through without a hitch – it warned me that because I didn’t have the hardware based virtualization support on the processors that I couldn’t run Windows based virtual machines… but who needs windows?

I really like XenServer 5 from Citrix, but I think I’m going to look at some other options. XenServer is now free, but it comes without the High Availability features and adding them would cost us about $2,300 – which is way over our budget. I would also like a web based interface so I can access and manage things from anywhere, and I’d like to sell VPSs – and customers definately need an interface to reload the OS, force a reboot, and get to a console in case of emergencies.

So why is a virtualized Uncorrupted a better thing? I can move the virtual servers over to a different physical machine if I need to replace hardware, add hardware, or patch XenServer… I can create backups and restore those backups quickly and easily (literally… 3 mouse clicks) in case of a hack or other emergency, and it’s just plain cool I can’t wait to see where this leads.