[K12OSN] Running K12LTSP under VMWare ESX

[Timothy Legge]

Henry Burroughs wrote:
> I was at FETC last week and was amazed at the number of FL public school 
> districts consolidating to VMWare.  I am going to try to put in a 
> fiber-channel SAN this summer and connect my 2 fastest servers up to it 
> (one of which is my k12ltsp box).  I already have a license for GSX, so 
> I am considering an upgrade to ESX for one machine and possibly another 
> license for ESX on the other server.  I need to provide MS Terminal 
> Services, K12LTSP services as well as domain controller/exchange/etc (I 
> am trapped with Exchange, no way out).  Anyone run K12LTSP under VMware 
> ESX?  I've got about max 15-20 users running nowadays.  The boxes are 
> Hyperthreaded Xeons (2 cpu), with one box 4 Gigs of ram (I might 
> increase) and the other 2 (I'm going to push that one to 8 gigs).

I have not run K12LTSP on ESX server but we run a significant testing 
environment on an ESX server consisting of multiple MSSQL database 
servers, MQueue servers, Linux, J2EE servers etc.  I forget the count 
but I imagine one ESX server is hosting 50 virtual servers.  The resonse 
time on most servers is remarkable.  As I have seen it, tuning and 
configuration is important and can cause huge increases in performance.

We are planning to move away from our GSX servers and would recommend 
ESX.  The ESX performance difference and ability to cope with more 
servers compared to GSX is amazing.  We may however evaluate the GSX 
replacement since it will run on Linux it may not be as constrained as GSX.

We have however noted that a few of our servers cope better on physical 
boxes (even fairly low end physical boxes) but that is the exception.

I hope this helps.

Tim