Many, many things on right now. I just got a courier package from over seas that I was expecting to get yesterday. By ‘Just Got’, I mean the courier arrived at 7:30 in the morning. Not sure why it was not delivered yesterday, but I suspect that my client yelled at them when it did not arrive. The CD could not be read on this PC so I needed to copy it off on another PC and then use a memory stick to move the files around. Yes, I could have used the LAN, but the memory stick was just as fast.

I did a bit more reading about ‘virtualized’ servers last night. It seems that VMware are trying to make their money on the value-add part of the business – that is, providing fail over should the machine need maintainence or fail, and doing this automatically without loosing state. Whilst this sounds like a great idea, it is not something that I really need.

They are providing, however, their server products free of charge. This is amazing… you just need to provide a base operating system for the virtual machines to run on, and that is that. I love this idea. I just need to decide what the best base operating system is for this application – is it Linux or Windows? I do not truely know. Both have some advantages and disadvantages I would guess. But the idea is that it becomes a base level install with almost no services running… Just the bare basics. You then run the virtual servers on top of this.

You can also have two machines running, taking a snapshot of each other periodically. And have both machines host both virtual machines. Then if one virtual machine fails, just start the 2nd virtual machine from the backup. How does this all work? Well, imagine a laptop that is suspended… The CPU is not running, and the entire state of the machine might be stored to HDD or memory. Well, imagine that you could take a snapshot of this for later. But also snapshot the HDD…

That is all we are doing here. So simple, yet so powerful!