IT organizations wishing to continue to run applications on the Microsoft Windows NT Server operating system have faced a limited
number of choices given the increasing lack of support for their aging hardware, and the lack of drivers for current hardware. The
ability of VMware ESX Server to host these operating system environments and their applications on state-of-the-art, high-performance
hardware platforms like the Sun Fire V40z server gives IT organizations a new class of options. Not only can they use virtualization
to run their applications on current, supported hardware â they can leverage the greater processing power, memory capacity, and disk
storage of today's servers to consolidate multiple PC server environments onto a single platform. Now IT organizations can upgrade
their hardware platforms, and use the upgrade process also to address their power, space, and cooling issues, while exploiting the
economies of scale that consolidation brings.
This Sun BluePrints article describes in step-by-step fashion how one such application â an Apache Web server running on the Windows
NT Server operating system â could be consolidated onto ESX Server running on a Sun Fire V40z server with no changes to the
application or its configuration. The importance of this exercise is not the application itself. It is the fact that the only
changes to the disk image imported by the physical-to-virtual process were to install drivers for the virtual network interface
and display devices supported by the virtual machine environment. Once an application is consolidated into the virtual environment
in this way, it can securely share a single platform with multiple instances of Windows operating systems and the applications that
they host. Because each virtual machine provides an idealized environment to the guest operating system, the disk images created by
the consolidation process are portable. So as this consolidation technique becomes proven in any given IT organization, PC workloads
can be re-distributed among a growing number of servers by moving virtual disks and virtual machine configuration files.
Note: This article is available in PDF Format only.
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