On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:14 AM, John Waycott<javajohn_at_cox.net> wrote:
> VM's are becoming very popular. IT departments are buying very powerful
> servers these days and they don't want to dedicate it to one task that takes
> 3% of the CPU... but they do want to sandbox stuff to avoid conflicts as
> much as possible.
A large subversion repository is one of the *worst* candidates for
virtualization. It's heavily disk I/O dependent, Its operations are
distinct and unlikely to remain cached well, and providing encryptions
to a VM is particularly burdensome for all sorts of practical and
theoretical reasons.
> That said... if the OP is looking for a low overhead solution to create a VM
> that only is for subversion, then I would say something like Debian Linux
> server will work just as well (with 0 license fees), if not better. Of
> course, if you don't have any *Nix admins on staff a Win server in a VM
> should work just fine.
>
> Another advantage of a good VM setup is the high availability it provides.
> We're running Citrix XenServer on two servers. SVN is in a VM. An IT admin
> can easily move the VM from one server to another without anyone noticing.
> It means that should there be a need to shutdown the server we can do it
> without shutting down SVN. This is important in globally distributed
> organizations like ours because developers access Subversion 24 hours/day.
> -- John
I like Xen a lot, and am saddened that RedHat seems to be pursuing KVM
instead: their integration of Xen into RHEL 5 (and thus, its
availability in CentOS as well) is extremely handy for building fast
prototyping environment.
The centralized deployment of Subversion and its CVS ancestor can
cause issues for detached development. Unfortunately, I've repeatedly
found that the work to port the latest Subversion back to an older,
still active OS can cause real pain and wasted engineering time. (RHEL
4 right now is such an environment: no, updating SQLite and Python is
not an option in this environment.)
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Received on 2009-07-04 03:47:39 CEST