svn in a virtual machine?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to upgrade versions of apache, subversion, and other related tools with minimal downtime. Currently I'm running RHEL4 and svn 1.4, and want to upgrade to apache 2.2 and svn 1.5.

One idea was to start running subversion in a virtual machine through vmware or virtualbox. Then I could update and test new versions of the software without any real downtime. Any thoughts on performance or other issues? Which version of vmware are people using?

If the virtual machine concept has issues, then I could always rehost the subversion server on another temporary server until the real svn server is upgraded and the dumpfiles are reloaded with the new version. This would allow developers to continually commit, and I could just load the incremental dumpfiles onto the updated svn server once ready. One of my repositories alone takes an hour to load from a dumpfile, so I really want to find a solution that allows me to have everything configured and just switch over to the new configuration with only a few minutes of downtime.

Any other ideas for upgrading and failover?

Thanks,
Jon

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Received on 2008-11-20 22:30:45 CET