Virtual Production Environment

[Magro]

Hey I'm very new to working in virtual environments and I was wondering if I could get some advice.

We recently purchases a share in a cloud which we intend on using for hosting virtual appliances. The cloud is administered using Vsphere 4.0.

This poses a problem as we are essentially running a vm inside of a vm.. I spent quite a bit of time reading up on this and it seems that this is not a good idea.. Is this still the case? Or are we moving towards a place where this is doable..

The advantages of running each projec in a vm are obvious.. Can anyone offer a suggestions on a possible solution. Should we just switch cloud hosting to a company that support VA deployment?

Thanks,

Ben

[thakala]

You are correct, VMs inside VM will get you in trouble if you intend to run any production in those. You can run ESX inside a ESX for testing purposes, VM performance will be awful and you will lose most of the vSphere features.

I think that there is many companies offering vSphere VM capacity so that you as customer do not need to invest or manage vSphere environment of your own, at least I work for one company which does this.

[edwardob]

Sorry, maybe I am missing something, but why do you think you will be running a vm inside of a vm?

You are going to be running virtual appliances, that is your single virtual machine.

Unless you mean to run that virtual appliance which is then going to run more virtual machines? if so under what kind of hyper visor?

If that is what you are doing you should look at a physical hosting company in place of cloud.

Or move away from managing your own virtual machines and just build what you need in the cloud. In other words you wont have to worry about virtual machine management, let the cloud provider do its job and you just keep creating new vm's in the cloud as you need an os.