Switching from physical servers to virtual servers

[Ikith]

So I was wondering what are the upsides and downsides to doing this? I'm running a amd sempron with 1gig of ram and 250 gig hd space would this be enough to run around 2-3 virtual servers using vmware server?

[The Stig]

Benefits are: It's faster, and easier to setup... (somewhat).

However, your specs don't seem up for the task, especially for 2-3. From my limited knowledge, I believe you'd want at least 4gb of RAM and depending on what you're gonna do, 1TB storage?

[Norellicus]

Virtualization of multiple systems on one box only accomplishes one thing: fewer physical PCs. If the box fails, ALL the servers go down, period, and all of them are generally running on not enough juice (unless the single box is like ridiculously overpowered, but the price of doing this vs just building individual boxes that can handle their own independent shit is astronomical).

Well designed virtualization systems will usually have a resource pool of two or more physical servers, with resources allocated from the pool as your virtual servers need them. If one physical system goes down, the resource pool shifts resources to cover it if possible; virtual server might hiccup a little but will generally recover on its own.

If you really need multiple servers and are seriously hurting for space, then go for it, otherwise you might want to rethink it. Virtual systems don't really save you a lot of administrative effort in the long run if you still have single points of failure.

Maybe consider getting rackmount systems that are 1-2U instead, can get 5 to 10 devices in a surprisingly small space that way (even without a rack, though a rack is preferred to maintain stability and cooling).

[levish]

Most of the latest and greatest processors and chipsets have some Virtualization acceleration and they improve virtualization performance with each generation. Typically the bottom of the barrel stuff (like the cheaper c2d or semprons) don't include them.

They do all go down at the same time but you should have a backup plan in place assuming its a production style environment meaning, possibly keep a reasonably capable backup server ready to load up the vm's onto if your primary goes out.