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

[Simon Capstick <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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