I am not very familiar with the world of virtualization, but want to explore the opportunities.
Most of our developers currently develop on their local machines; I want to see if this can be made a bit more streamlined and give everyone a virtual machine to work on. Each VM should be an exact copy of a 'base' VM and I should be able to easily create new VMs.
Apart from knowing some of the brands out there – VMware and Virtualbox being the ones I am most familiar with – , I really don't know enough to make a solid choice.
Requirements:
- 3-5 VM's. Should be pretty easy to create additional ones
- Cheap / free: preferable choice would be to install the VM software on our existing Windows 2008 server so that we can experiment with it before actually deploying a dedicated server for it.
- VMs only need to run a LAMP stack, no GUI. No need for massive amounts of CPU/RAM.
Questions:
- What would be the best choice considering these requirements?
- What platform do I need to host this? Is it possible to use our current server for this?
Best Answer
If you're looking at setting up a dedicated server for your Devs to use I would recommend VMware's ESXi. It's free and fairly easy to setup but it does run on the bare metal so you would have to blow away your server or install VMware Server on your 2008 server to play with ESXi before hand.
VMware workstation, VMware Player and Virtual Box are all good choices if want to run the software on the developers local machine. This way they can run the same setup as the live server without walking over each others changes.
I actually use both ESXi and VMWare workstation in my test environment with Workstation on the local developers computer, ESXi running on a QA/internal server, and ESXi running the live site.