Virtualisation

In the beginning...

Over the years, to support our Ruby on Rails development and test environments (and to undertake internal R&D), we've put together a number of virtual enviroments to help us achieve our goals. And yes this has helped significantly in cutting hardware spend, speeded up project delivery and provided a resilient platform to deal with unexpected downtime.

Up until now we've used VMware solutions as the platform for our virtualised environment, but after some, not inconsiderable, investigation and trials we've turned to a full on Open Source solution.

OpenVZ

After considering various virtualisation approaches, including Xen, we've hung our hat on OpenVZ.

As well as being an Open Source project we feel there are sufficient advantages in the ease of management of this solution and performance benefits that make it a viable and serious choice.

Performance is looked at in some detail here http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-59R1.pdf

We're confident that OpenVZ delivers what we need and we're rolling it out right now.

If you need assistance with adopting OpenVZ as your commercial virtualisation platform or are thinking of going down this road contact us for consultancy.

To find out more about OpenVZ visit http://wiki.openvz.org/Main_Page