Re: [gentoo-security] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare

[Kevin van Haaren <kevin@vanhaaren.net>]

--On November 3, 2006 12:04:33 PM -0500 7v5w7go9ub0o 
<7v5w7go9ub0o@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Lots of interest in VMs lately - Is this to increase security (isolating
> servers and components in case one is compromised)? Or perhaps you are
> isolating components for the purpose of evaluating them?

there are additional benefits, mainly for enterprise use, such as being 
able to move the virtual server to a new box in case of failure of the 
first box. This is much cheaper than maintaining an identically configured 
second box. VMWare's high-end (not free) product can do this automatically 
if partnered with a SAN. Using SAN technology the second box could even be 
off-site, providing a virtually instant disaster recovery plan (just not a 
cheap one.)

You could even save the cost of redundant box by using Amazon's Elastic 
Compute Cloud as your redundancy. Keep a copy of the image on Amazon S3 
then fire up the image if the main one goes down.  Might be a bit slower 
but that beats being down.

Also snapshot technology is getting pretty cool, where you can take a 
snapshot, upgrade a virtual box, and if the upgrade fails just roll back to 
the snapshot. Beats a backup/restore cycle by a mile.

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