Friday, September 15, 2006

Virtuozzo Going Down

Once a large advocate for SWsoft's Virtuozzo server virtualization software, I'm now in the process or migrating our virtual servers away from Virtuozzo and back to VMware Server. Both products have pros and cons, but when it comes to stability, isolation and hardware independence VMware wins. Two weeks ago our Virtuozzo server took a hard dive when I applied 4 of the latest patches. This took out our domain controllers (which in turn meant no Exchange or DNS resolution). I did a repair installation of Windows, which got Windows sort of running, but my Virtual Private Servers wouldn't. I re-installed Virtuozzo to try and resolve the problem, but that didn't help the situation. Finally I took the backups of the VPS to some test hardware and used that to get them up and running. The next problem was with the license not being correct for that server. Next the restore corrupted my Active Directory, so I had to do some force demotion and metadata cleanup to get that working. Finally the system worked, sort of, for the next few weeks, limping along. I don't like the way Virtuozzo handles domain controllers in the VPS. For some reason it takes close to 20 minutes before they will respond to requests. The Active Directory seems to easily get corrupted. Bottom line, I'm going back to VMware, I never had issues like this with that software. We'll keep Virtuozzo though, but only for testing and development servers.

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