I’ve been surprised and pleased at just how well Windows Server 2008 runs virtualized under Debian Squeeze. I first started running virtual Windows Servers purely for the disaster recovery and portability aspects, expecting to pay with a drop in performance… but what I found was that in a lot of cases, Windows 2008’s performance is actually somewhat better when running virtually. In particular, the ever-annoying reboot cycle gets cut to a tiny, tiny fraction of what it would be if running on “the bare metal.”
It’s also pretty nice never, ever having to play “hunt-the-driver” – the virtual “hardware” is all natively supported by Windows, so a virtual install “just works” the moment it’s done, no fuss no muss. But what about that performance?
Smokin’! Which exposes yet another reason to think about virtualization: being able to take advantage of Linux’s highly superior kernel RAID capabilities. The box shown above is running four Crucial C300 128GB solid state drives connected to SATA-3 6Gbps ports on an ASUS board; the Debian Squeeze host has them set up in a kernel RAID10. The resulting 250GB or so of storage is on a performance level that just has to be seen to be believed.
Note that while this IS a really “hot” machine, it’s still just one machine, running on commodity hardware – there’s no $50,000 SAN lurking in the background somewhere; that performance is ALL coming from a single machine with a price tag of WELL under $10K.
Ready to upgrade yet? =)
