For several months now I’ve been planning to virtualize my home server. That’s the server hosting this blog, among other things. For starters it would give me some more room to test different applications on separate operating system, but without the hassle of dealing with several physical computers.

One of my ideas is to test web application prior to deployment. This is kind of hard now that I only have one machine. It’s would be shameful if I accidently killed the web service because of a faulty configuration. Also I have a few projects which I want to separate from the machine visible on the internet.

VMware Server is a free product which can be installed on top of either Windows or Linux, so it’s not a bare-metal hypervisor. I recommend running it on top of Linux for minimal footprint, not to mention all the rebooting you have to do with Windows. A minimal Ubuntu server installation takes less than 1GB of disc space, and use next to nothing when it comes to terms of memory.

For the moment I’m doing some testing with one mySQL server, one Apache web server and one server running Varnish, which is a cache/proxy service. It’s not because I’m expecting high load in the near future, but it’s an interesting solution.

Anyway; the next few months I expect this blog to focus more on virtualization, but I can’t guarantee anything. I would be satisfied if I keep writing semi regular, no matter the topic.