Has anyone tried this or had any experience with this? We're using Enfold Server and for staging and development purposes instead of using separate machines we're thinking of setting up a 'virtual machines' on the same server. There appear to be many benefits. However knowing that Zope/Plone are RAM instensive this could be an issue. Thanks -- michael
On 11/7/07, michael nt milne <michael.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
Has anyone tried this or had any experience with this? We're using Enfold Server and for staging and development purposes instead of using separate machines we're thinking of setting up a 'virtual machines' on the same server. There appear to be many benefits. However knowing that Zope/Plone are RAM instensive this could be an issue.
There is no issue in running Zope in Windows _or_ running Zope inside a VM. It does need the same amount of RAM as running it not inside a VM. Whether that counts as "RAM intensive" or not depends on what you do with it and whether you have a comparison to another application. VMs tend to have a bit lower performance per MHz, so if you can live with that (and have the RAM to feed the VM) go ahead. You can later decide to put it on a dedicated machine anyway. --knitti
ok, so you could have two virtual machines say development and also staging which sat alongside a live production 'non virtual' instance of Zope. This would all sit on the one physical machine. The dev and staging instances would be switched off and on as required. With enough RAM and CPU would this be a realistic set-up for a service? On 11/7/07, knitti <knitti@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/7/07, michael nt milne <michael.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
Has anyone tried this or had any experience with this? We're using Enfold Server and for staging and development purposes instead of using separate machines we're thinking of setting up a 'virtual machines' on the same server. There appear to be many benefits. However knowing that Zope/Plone are RAM instensive this could be an issue.
There is no issue in running Zope in Windows _or_ running Zope inside a VM. It does need the same amount of RAM as running it not inside a VM. Whether that counts as "RAM intensive" or not depends on what you do with it and whether you have a comparison to another application.
VMs tend to have a bit lower performance per MHz, so if you can live with that (and have the RAM to feed the VM) go ahead. You can later decide to put it on a dedicated machine anyway.
--knitti
-- michael
On 11/7/07, michael nt milne <michael.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
ok, so you could have two virtual machines say development and also staging which sat alongside a live production 'non virtual' instance of Zope. This would all sit on the one physical machine. The dev and staging instances would be switched off and on as required. With enough RAM and CPU would this be a realistic set-up for a service?
Yes. Here are the implications: - the hardware is your single point of complete failure - the whole machine would share its performance among native and virtual instances, so staging and development will have an impact on the production instance - if you production instance gets compromised, its not far for intruders to staging/development - the other way round (atack on zope instance, then attack on vm to reach the host) is pobably not very much harder why don't you just run 3 zope instances on the host? If its a pure zope application, then they won't interfere with each other. Although you can't upgrade zope idependently then, its in any case better resource-wise. --knitti
yes I realise about the single point of failure. Ideally of course we'd have separate physical servers for this. It's an intranet so security is less of an issue. There just seem to be advantages from running virtual machines. I'm not an expert but aren't they easier to manage, rollback and back-up? Possibly the best idea would be to have a dev and staging as virtual machines on one server and then the live instance on another. Interesting that a VM service would only require the RAM that Zope requires normally. You would naturally think that the VM service would take up quite a bit of RAM itself? On 11/7/07, knitti <knitti@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/7/07, michael nt milne <michael.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
ok, so you could have two virtual machines say development and also staging which sat alongside a live production 'non virtual' instance of Zope. This would all sit on the one physical machine. The dev and staging instances would be switched off and on as required. With enough RAM and CPU would this be a realistic set-up for a service?
Yes. Here are the implications: - the hardware is your single point of complete failure - the whole machine would share its performance among native and virtual instances, so staging and development will have an impact on the production instance - if you production instance gets compromised, its not far for intruders to staging/development - the other way round (atack on zope instance, then attack on vm to reach the host) is pobably not very much harder
why don't you just run 3 zope instances on the host? If its a pure zope application, then they won't interfere with each other. Although you can't upgrade zope idependently then, its in any case better resource-wise.
--knitti
-- michael
On 11/7/07, michael nt milne <michael.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
yes I realise about the single point of failure. Ideally of course we'd have separate physical servers for this. It's an intranet so security is less of an issue. There just seem to be advantages from running virtual machines. I'm not an expert but aren't they easier to manage, rollback and back-up?
that depends entirely on your needs. Copying away the Zope tree and the instances' products and extensions every time you change something on it and copying away the Data.fs every x hours isn't exactly hard, is it? And it requires less space. Having a VM lying aroung just to copy-over and run is also handy, but you need more resources. You decide. Design your backup/restore process well, when you need it you probably won't have much time thinking about it.
Interesting that a VM service would only require the RAM that Zope requires normally. You would naturally think that the VM service would take up quite a bit of RAM itself?
I didn't say that. I just said, that respective to zope's RAM usage its irrelevant, whether it is inside a VM or not. Of course you need the RAM for the VM itself. --knitti
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