Our OpenVZ Virtualization Experience
We are currently finalizing the server consolidation in our department. The product we chose for virtualization is OpenVZ, because it sports creepy Russians. All in all, it was a bit of a roller coaster ride, but once we figured out that most of the problems came from our own incompetence, we quickly stopped pointing fingers and shaking fists and instead read some documentation. Then all was good. We went from 12 servers to 5, killing 7 physical servers and saving roughly 1500W of power consumption. The new virtualization servers we used were actually the old database server and the old main web server, both overpowered. A change in the mentality and the technical competence level required from our students in the last few years has made the extra power for these boxes unneccessary. Now we’re using them much more efficiently because each of them runs several virtual servers. ...