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Re: [Xen-users] XEN and Windows Guests in critical environment (hospital

To: Jordi Espasa Clofent <sistemes.llistes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] XEN and Windows Guests in critical environment (hospital)
From: Simon Capstick <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:27:09 +0100
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Jordi Espasa Clofent wrote:
Hi all,

One friend of mine are thinking about how to implement virtualization in their critical job environment (a hospital). The main "problem" is there are a lot of medical application builded in .NET tecnology; so, I view three possible options:

1.  Win server with VMware and win guests (IIS to support .NET).
2.  UNIX/Linux server with XEN (or XenEnterprise) and win guests
3. UNIX/Linux server with XEN (or XenEnterprise) and UNIX/Linux guests (Apache with mod_mono to support .NET)

...

I don't think virtualisation is necessarily going to help reliability although it may help in other ways.

If money wasn't an issue I would go for a redundant/mirrored iSCSI SAN with regular snapshots and remote backups and have bare metal Windows servers with HBAs booting off the SAN. Spare servers could be configured to take over a non-functioning one very quickly. You could still use virtualisation but you would need to couple it with something like heartbeat to make it more reliable than the bare metal servers.

I would imagine if these applications are critical then the applications themselves should be written and be able to run in a redundant fashion anyway, otherwise the software is not really fit for purpose.

You need to decide what amount of down time is acceptable. 1 second, 1 minute, 1 hour. 1 day etc.. Each has a technical solution, tending to be more expensive the more reliable it is.

Simon

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