From: "Geo" 

"Robert Comer"  wrote in message
news:43804623{at}w3.nls.net...

> I don't understand you on this, but there's isn't any difference between a
> virtual server and a physical server for the way I'm talking virtual,
other
> than the fact that you can run more than one of them on the same physical
> hardware -- a virtual server is just another PC server to the outside
world.

Ok let me explain it this way. With a single booted copy of W2K you can
assign multiple IP addresses and host multiple websites, you can also
assign one IP address and host multiple websites. Both these examples are
of a single physical server, single virtual server (in the sense you use
virtual server) because there is one NT user database providing security
for all the sites, ie. there is only 1 administrator user.

With virtual servers you have multiple copies of W2K booted so you can have
multiple administrator users, each of these virtual servers can run a
single or multiple websites. But this method has a price for allowing
multiple administrator users, it uses up a lot of memory loading the OS
multiple times in each vm.

Typically the setup in this second example would be done where each
administrator wanted to load a different set of web extensions or maybe one
wants to run IIS and another wants to run apache, etc. It's far more
resource intensive this way.

In the first example there is one copy of the OS and one copy of IIS
running, each user is not a machine admin but instead is a website
publisher, control of the OS remains with the machine administrator and
each user must settle for whatever set of web extensions this administrator
has decided to provide. This is how most windows based hosting is done.

The virtual machines method allows under 50 websites per machine, the
single machine method allows hundreds because it's far less resource
intensive (even IIS is only loaded once although it's providing hundreds of
websites).

> Think of what I'm saying as just server consolidation, from 30 physical
> servers to 1 or 2 -- it would take the same time to patch the 30 as it
would
> the 1 or 2 (with 30 virtual servers on them)

It's not the same, 30 real physical machines could host 600x30 websites, 30
virtual machines on one physical box could host 30 websites. It's a huge
difference, I would need 20 physical machines to host 600 websites and
that's 20x30 more labor for patching. It's a huge difference.

Geo.

Geo.

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