This is a short technical review of the Innotek VirtualBox software showing the pros and cons of server virtualization and consolidation as a whole. In this article I will show you how to install the VirtualBox application and get running, as a proof of concept, an Ubuntu Linux on top of Microsoft Vista OS as a host.

Why would you need server virtualization and consolidation

There are a lot of articles explaining what is, what is not and providing many reasons why you might need to virtualize your servers. I will approach the topic in a different way by just listing the pluses and minuses of the technology and will let you decide whether you need or want to use it.

I will start with the pluses:

• Single hardware machine for all (or at least many) of your virtual servers. You will need, in most cases, just a single machine to host all your virtual servers, which naturally reduces hardware costs.
• Server Consolidation. Since the full performance of today’s servers is rarely needed full-time and servers typically run only at a fraction of their maximum performance, you can save a lot of hardware costs by packing your servers as virtual machines onto a few powerful hosts and balance the loads between them.
• Fast deployment of new servers. Should you need to create a new server it’s just a matter of minutes to create it.
• Various Guest Operating Systems. You can run many different OS on the same hardware machine, allowing you to develop/test software much easier using multi-os environment.
• Portability. Moving a virtual server is just a matter of copying the server hdd file created on the host machine. This enables you to create backups or relocate servers much easier than if you would do that using real hardware servers.
• Virtual Hardware. Since the hardware is fully simulated, your guest OS can have hardware parts attached to it, without having those parts actually presented on the host server. For example, you can easily create a server utilizing SCSI discs, while your host server is actually using IDE/SATA.

Now the minuses of using virtualization:

• Single point of failure. If your host machine become inaccessible due to hardware issue all the virtual servers would be unavailable as well.
• Shared resources usage. If one of your virtual servers is using a lot of the host resources, the rest of the virtual servers might be unable to operate properly. In other words, you would need to monitor the resource usage of each VS.

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In this article we will guide you through the Ubuntu 7.10 server edition installation process. If you have an old piece of hardware and would like to make it a server or you need a LAMP server where you can host your website you can easily setup the Ubuntu server edition and take advantage of one of the most popular Linux distributions.

You can download the Server edition from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. Please make sure that you have selected the correct version and select the correct type of your system from the menus. As soon as you have the Ubuntu image downloaded burn it on a CD and you can begin the installation procedure. Put the Ubuntu 7.10 server CD into your CD-Rom and boot from it.

From the main screen select Install to the hard disk and press Enter. First you will be asked to choose your language. By default it is English and for this article we will use this option. So, select English and press Enter again. Then you will be asked for your location. Depending on the language that you have selected in the previous step a country is selected for you. We will use United States for this tutorial. Press Enter once again when you have your country selected. Next you will be asked if you would like to have your keyboard layout detected by the Ubuntu. It would be a good idea to perform this in order to have your keyboard properly set. Select “Yes” and you will be asked several questions. Based on your answers Ubuntu will suggest a keyboard layout for you. Most probably you will have US keyboard layout. However, you can always go back and manually configure your keyboard.

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If you have a small server for your own use (such as your personal page) or have a busy server servicing a lot of php requests you might find it a good idea to install some goodies in order to optimize the performance of your machine. A really good start might be installing the eAccelerator.

The eAccelerator extension caches compiled PHP scripts both in shared memory and on disk. By this it reduces the time needed for a server to service a php request for a page that has been already cached.

The latest version of eAccelerator is completely compatible with PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.2, so if you run Ubuntu 7.10 you should not experience any difficulties to install the php accelerator. Before you actually start with the installation you will need to install some packages in advance which are requested by the eAccelerator. This can be really accomplished by the following commands:

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