I decided to actually go all out and test to see how well my blog here would run on a virtual machine. I started by downloading VMWare Server (Free), and then grabbed a VMWare Appliance from their “Virtual Appliance Marketplace” that provides a nice, minimally sized LAMP server… I picked up one simply called “LAMP Server” from Virtual Appliances.
The whole process only took around 30 minutes, including the downloading of the software and migration of my blog.
I installed VMWare Server and rebooted, double clicked the LAMP Server appliance and started it and set it to a static IP I had laying around idle… I then changed all the default passwords and SSH’ed into it.
On the former claytond.com server, I tarred up the root, backed up the database and CURLed it all over to the Virtual LAMP server… Un-tarred the content, restored the MySQL Dump file, linked it all up and was done. Then finished it off by change the DNS to the new static IP.
Very simple and it seems to be working fine. The virtual machine is running under a Windows 2003 Server host using most of the available memory on the host. I could set it lower, but have no need to at the moment, the 2003 server is just a mostly idle secondary DNS server and isn’t doing much.