On May 9, 2008, at 3:21 PM, Noah Abrahamson wrote:
On May 9, 2008, at 10:55 AM, Josh Wisenbaker wrote:
Outside of test, dev, and QA environments I don't see a lot of
market actually. Mac OS X Server scales well enough to fully
utilize a box. At that point splitting it isn't the solution,
adding more hardware is.
One of the tests that I'm doing is whether MOSX server VMs might be
something we could offer to university departments who may, due to
costs, be choosing to run their own server (minus the professional
administration from IT central services, which costs considerably).
We are exploring offering a MOSXS VM to a department, where we
manage the host Xserve, house it in our climate controlled, secure
space, but give their department full access to their VM. We could
optionally provide admin/monitoring services for a reduced rate
since we don't have to make cross-campus trips to their location.
They don't have to buy new hardware or energy. For central services
wishing to provide this service, deployment could be rapid, since a
prefab/preconfigured VM may already be at hand. And it's space
saving, which is important (at least on this campus). We're thinking
this might be ideal for departments that have, say, under 15
concurrent users who are mainly interested in AFP and possibly SMB
and Web, but little more. It would be much cheaper for them to buy a
VM.
That's a very solid idea.
Note I never said that there was no use for it, just that I'm having a
hard time thinking of production applications for it. Some of this is
due to the space I work in.
