Joined on 05-21-2005
TechSoup Member
While Lo's article on virtualization was interesting and informative, I think it did the NPO community an injustice by not discussing the hardware that's necessary to run multiple virtual OS's. Non-profits find themselves using whatever hardware they can get their hands on (donations, hand-me-downs, etc.) - few if any of the NPOs receive donations of machines that have enough resources to run a virtualized environment.
Great information, but not quite the complete story. Virtualization isn't a viable option if the NPO doesn't have the necessary hardware to host the various OS's that Lo speaks of...
Russ Foszcz
Touché, Russ. I've tried running VMware on an old PIII with 512 mb ram and it was useless for all practical purposes. It was very slow. Minimum system req's for their ESX system is a 1.5 ghz processor and a gb of ram. And really you need more than that: a dual core processor is probably in order, especially for running a virtual Windows server. Virtualizing some of the smaller Linux servers might work fine though.
Karl