One of the goals I have for the new system is to replace the two existing servers.
My current plan is to do this via virtualization.
There are a number of virtualization options available … each with advantages & disadvantages.
The virtualization products I’m currently consider are:
Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.
The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP. I logged the issue in the WordPress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.
Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance. Luckily WordPress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately). A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine. The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running. No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.
Once the bug is fixed (either WordPress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.
In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).