My company is hosting a few separate, but related, moderately hit, web sites. Accordingly, a production database server, staging database server, production web server, staging web server, etc are needed. My question is, should we invest in physically separate servers for each of our needs, or should we put that money together and invest in a much higher end server and virtualize all of the aforementioned servers? Which route would you guys decide on, and why?
R – Separated servers or virtualization, which is more efficient
virtualization
Best Answer
That depends on a lot of things, here are the main considerations.
If you have a lot of servers with low to moderate usage, virtualization should generally save you money on hardware, power, and floorspace. There is a tipping point, however, based on the overhead of the VM layer itself. Honestly, you will have to experiment to find the right cost/performance balance on this. I am sure the VM vendors would be happy to help you with the math.
The downside is that virtualization creates a single point of failure. If that box fails, you have downtime for all of your servers. Having them separate makes it far less likely for everything to take a dive at once.