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roberlamerma
Contributor
Contributor

Infraestructure planning for a development environment

Hi all,

I am planning set up a development environment to be used for the R&D and development teams at my company. The main problem we are having is to test quickly and without much hassle the (several) solutions we develop. The tests are independent from each other, which means several teams can be accessing several projects concurrently.

The solutions consist mainly on two or three Windows Servers, running one or two Windows Services each:

\- The CPU usage is low/medium

\- Memory usage is high

\- Network usage is high

The hardware (for the Host OS) has not yet been purchased, but Im planning to buy two machines, each with a dual core (a fast one!), 4 Gb RAM, etc.

After evaluating the solutions offered by VMWare, its still unclear to me what should I get. This is the scenario I figured out, please correct if I'm wrong:

\- Host OS x 2: OpenSuse, with latest supported kernel by VMWare.

\- VMWare Workstation 6 with ACE option to generate ACE packets. Each ACE packet will have 2/3 Win2003 Server + our Apps + Security Policies.

\- VMWare ACE Management Server, to administer the Virtual Machines.

\- Virtual machines will have own IP (no NAT)

The applications used in the projects are not disk Read/Write intensive (besides writing a 5 Mb growing-log-a-day, with logrotate policy), so I didn't suggest a RAID... or should I?

And to conclude (thanks for going so far, this is getting long!), is there any real benefit (speaking about efficiency) by using a customized Linux (minimal kernel, just the necessary services) instead of, lets say, a Win2003 Server? (Im quite comfortable administering Linux)

Any free Linux distro (which works out of the box) recommended, instead of OpenSuse?

Your help will be greatly appreciated,

--

R.

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