I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if vmware would be a good way to go for some testing. My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap. We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse to send confidential patient records. RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5. If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data to a new server would make for a fast upgrade. Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other recommendations on how I should tackle this? Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works. We have about 20 XP machines here. The server also hosts mail as well. -- -=/>Thom
Thom Paine wrote:> I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if > vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.Yes.> My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I > should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap. > We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a > VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse > to send confidential patient records. > > RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5. > > If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about > running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to > be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data > to a new server would make for a fast upgrade.Should work if you can afford the performance hit of VMware overhead. Would probably want to use bridged networking.> Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other > recommendations on how I should tackle this? > > Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works. > We have about 20 XP machines here. > > The server also hosts mail as well.Does not seem like a big load. Pretty easy to give it a try. You can even DL a CentOS VMware pre-built image for Player and bypass installation: http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/ Phil
Am 30.10.2008 um 20:37 schrieb Thom Paine:> I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if > vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.You can use either VMware Server 2.0 or VMware VI3i, provided your hardware is supported. VMware Server needs some OS as base (CentOS5 should do well), but 3i goes on the bare metal - it's based on RHEL, too, though. 4 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum. I wouldn't virtualize all storage. Use a separate server and NFS mount all storage from that, if you can (maybe Samba is the exception - SMB- exporting NFS-mounted stuff makes Samba even more tricky than it already is). But the less disk-I/O you've got to virtualize, the higher the overall performance you can yield. You can virtualize mail, but only if it doesn't do much I/O. Else it will be painfully slow. What's your storage? How do you plan to backup stuff? CentOS is not officially supported by VMware (probably never will). If you have a problem, you're on your own. And VMware is not open-source. But I'm not sure if there's actually anyting in the market that is better than VMware (for full virtualization). Rainer