When/Where we use VMware and .net combination?

Question

Hi all, I heard that the combination of VMware and .net application(Web) but dont know why this combination? Does any one have the idea about when and where we use these combinations.?

Edit: There are some advantages of running your webserver in a virtual machine.. what are they?

Answer 1

Here comes virtualization. Decide whether you need it at all and then realize that VMware capabilities are greater than of Virtual PC.

And whether to use virtual machines there's at least one tip: you can develop on a "machine" that can be placed in your pocket, launching it anywhere if only VMware is accessible. This saves you back-up tasks and lets you roam keeping one environment.

Other way is creating multiple testing environments. This saves more effort when different software configurations are required to check.

Well, there are many more continuations here.

Answer 2

Please specify your question a little bit more precisely.

VMware is a company which sells virtualization technology whereas the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET respectively are software technologies.

You can of course install Windows Server 200x on a virtual machine and run an IIS on it to host an ASP.NET Website, but because both technologies are fundamentally different, I would not call this a combination.

There are some advantages of running your webserver in a virtual machine:

• You can isolate the virtual machine from the rest of your infrastructure, what makes your system safer when being attacked by some hackers or so.

• You can make snapshots of virtual machines which saves the current state of the virtual machine. You can then later roll back to any snapshot you want.

Best Regards
Oliver Hanappi

Answer 3

You can use vmware with one server for different tasks. For example sql server,web server,dhcp,dns etc.

Answer 4

The main points of virtualisation tend to be:

1. Increased use of resources:
   • Running one web server on one physical bit of hardware generally means that there's a lot of spare capacity in terms of memory and processing power.
   • Running multiple web servers on the same physical bit of hardware results in a more even use of those resources.
2. Some redundancy:
   • By having multiple web servers you can load-balance between them, however as you only have one physical machine, if that fails you've still lost everything.
   • If your site suddenly sees a massive spike in traffic, the fact that you're using more resources means there is less capacity to pick up the overload.
3. Reduced cost:
   • If the bulk of your costs are in the hardware, then ensuring it's fully utilised is more economical, however, if the bulk of your costs are licenses, then this could be a false economy.

As with many things, there are a number of trade-offs to be made, and you'll need to look at them properly, and work out where the cost-benefit lies.

Note that some server roles are better suited to virtualisation than others - search/indexing servers and database servers in particular are often fairly resource hungry and prefer to run directly on the server rather than in a virtualised environment.

Answer 5

Advantages of using VMWare for your webserver could be the automatic failover to other physical boxes if a virtual machine fails for some reason (this happens to us).

The only other important note that has arisen from using VMWare in our web application setup is to never, ever and I mean ever use VMWare boxes for running SQLServer. I know this question was specifically about the webserver but we've had such poor experiences (speed, disk access errors etc) with our web application databases on VMWare that I think it's important!