It’s funny how one thing leads to another. About a month ago I installed a new photo management tool on my web server. I love the tool, but it runs pretty slow on a machine with only 512 meg of RAM. That sent me in search of more RAM, which for this particularly outdated machine, was super expensive. For a couple hundred dollars more, I ended up buying an completely new machine.
This, however, isn’t just any machine. Spec-wise, the two machines aren’t even in the same ballpark. The old machine is a single-core 2ghz machine w/512 meg of RAM; the new machine is a quad-core, 2.3ghz machine with 8 gigs of RAM.
The reason for the substantial upgrade is virtualization. I plan on using this new server as a virtual host and running multiple virtual servers on it. (If you understand that, awesome. If not … the 10 second explanation is, with virtualization you can run more than one computer on one single physical computer.)
You can’t run more than 4 gigs of RAM on a standard Windows server; to use all 8 gigs (if I stick with Windows) I’ll have to move up to Enterprise. Other possible solutions include VMWare’s ESXi, or a 64-bit version of Linux (probably either Ubuntu or Fedora). At this point I haven’t really decided yet. Windows would probably be the least efficient choice; it’s also the solution I understand the best. I am pretty comfortable with ESX, so that wouldn’t be too big a change here for the house. As for Linux, I’d rank myself as a “dabbler” and even though I wouldn’t consider my website a business, it’s still a “production environment” and I’m not sure I trust myself enough (especially from a security standpoint) to put that out on the Internet.
Regardless of what I pick, it’ll have to happen tomorrow. It’s 2am and I’ve run out of steam for the day.