Virtualization Pt. 1

I've been experimenting with PC virtualization for a while now. I've pretty much settled on VMWare's Virtual Server II as my primary software to use as it uses real virtualization (CPU extensions and host byte-code execution) rather than emulation. I get to still utilize my actual hardware features rather than have to use the emulated device. I was a bit put-off by the slow web interface, but have since upgraded to the much faster Windows Infrastructure Client application for it.

I wanted to start perparing for real network/server work and I wanted to do this using a virtual environment. I downloaded two copies of Windows Server 2003 x64 (180-day trial), two copies of CentOS 5.3 x64, and Ubuntu 8.10 x64. These are all installed and running currently.

I have the two Windows 2k3 servers acting as Domain Controllers (PDC and BDC running in failover + load-balance mode) and DNS servers (for clients to use). Then, I have the two CentOS servers acting as Apache + MySQL + Squid servers running in failover mode. Then of course, there's the lone Ubuntu client used for testing.

I've tested the Domain Controllers out and can do a full network logon with roaming profile support. I've also tested its failover abilities and it worked flawlessly. MicroSoft really put a lot of good code into making the Domain Controller and Active Directory managment software, two thumbs up. Squid was fairly easy to setup and I had to configure it not to do the actual caching part as all I wanted was the website blacklisting feature. It works great and is easy to manage. Apache2 and MySQL (with PHPMyAdmin) has always been easy to install + configure. I've setup Apache tons of times before on different host OS's, so it was a walk in the park.

Server 2003 is expensive, but worth it for any network that requires a good network logon server. CentOS is a great stable OS that has good uses as a web/file server, and you can't beat it's price.