Uses for VMs

The plan to develop on VMs for a while should be beneficial for a few things:

  • There’s Database work to be done and a VM is a good place to do it
    Can simulate some stress testing scenarios with VMs, namely:
    • Make a small server space and put a large website/DB in it. – then try to optimise the site a little, maybe caching the MySQL output or other??
    • Corrupt some data by shutting down the machine half way through a MySQL dump – then try to retrieve as much of the data as possible.
    • Make an attempt at clustering – run several DB or duplicates of DBs on the server and attempt to make them balance.
  • There’s also a need to learn about Drupal, so it’s an excellent environment to run that on.

What I need is a simple package on which I can run Ubuntu and install in the same way as the rest of our services are run. Then, if I can access that through a browser and on command line, I should be able to achieve all of the above and make some progress.

I’ll document my findings and any pain points or ideas along the way.