EveryDNS.net was founded by the same person who founded OpenDNS. EveryDNS provides both static and dynamic DNS services for your TLD. I’ve found that’s it’s really hard to find good DNS services for free. My registrar, 1&1 provides free DNS service for any domain you register. However, it’s very limited in nature. You can only have only have a limited number of records such as one A record. 1&1 does not offer dynamic DNS services.
EveryDNS has both static and dynamic DNS services. You can manage up to 25 zones with them and up to 200 records for free. For a small payment of $15, you can have as many zones and records as you want. EveryDNS is very reliable. They’ve been around forever, and they’ve had pretty much 100% uptime. For free, what more could you want.
I’ll also plug 1&1. 1&1 is one of the cheapest registrars. They’re not particularly fast, but once you register the domain and port the DNS to EveryDNS, who cares how fast they are.
I’ve recently been playing around with VMware’s ESX 3i server virtualization system. So far, my feelings are rather mixed. It’s not particularly easy to get running, and beyond that, it’s not particularly easy to use. However, once you get past that, you’ll see the power of a low-level virtualization system.
I have a lot of experience with VMware Server 2.0, which is far easier to install and configure. Just run the executable on your favorite Windows or Linux system. I’d recommend Linux because it has lower base requirements. One of the things I liked about Server is the web based interface for managing the VMs. ESXi makes you download the VMware Infrastructure Client to manage the server and its VMs. Now, that’s not bad, but I like the web interface better. It feels nicer.
I’ve not had any luck getting my VMware Server machines to run on ESXi. For me, that was the killer. I spent some time trying to get it to see those VMs. I copied them to the datastore, tried setting up new machines pointing to the VHD, however that didn’t work because it wouldn’t find the VHD. All in all, it was a painful process. I gave up after a couple of hours.
ESXi seems to be a really powerful engine. That’s one thing it has going for it. It’s also free, that’s another huge thing. It also has a really steep learning curve. That being said, if you want the highest performance for your virtual servers, and you can deal with the learning curve, go for ESXi. If you just want it to work without a lot of trouble, go for Server.
Happy Pi day everyone!
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A few years ago, VMWare released VMWare Server at no charge to customers. VMWare Server v. 1 had demanding requirements to run on Windows. You needed a Windows Server machine configured with IIS and ASP.NET. You no longer need Windows Server, nor do you need IIS. You can run Server 2 on any NT based system including all versions of XP.
VMWare Server is certainly nothing new, but I’ve only recently started dabbling in the world of virtualization. There are two types of server virtualization systems. One is hypervisor based and runs as its own operating system. The other is software based and runs on top of another operating system. VMWare Server is the latter type. It can run on any NT based Windows system or any recent Linux kernel. There are several differences. Hypervisor based systems generally run better. They’re more efficient and use less resources to run the VM software. However, software based systems have their advantages. You don’t need to dedicate a server to run your VMs on; you can run them on any Windows or Linux based systems.
Server virtualization systems are not like desktop virtualization systems. They are optimized for services that are mission critical and that need to run whenever the system is on. Desktop virtualization systems, such as Parallels or VMWare Workstation, generally don’t have options to start the VM when the system starts, whereas the server virtualization systems.
VMWare server provides a web based interface to manage the VMs. There is no need to install a client (except an Active-X plugin or Firefox extension for remote console). I personally liked this. When compared with VMWare’s hypervisor based solution ESX, this for me, is a huge advantage. I like being able to control the virtual servers from wherever I am without needing to install client software. For me, neither is a huge deal since I have my laptop everywhere, but the convenience is still nice.
All in all, I really like VMWare Server as a virtualization solution for consolidating servers. Check back later for an article on ESX 3i