Server Building Made Easy w/ Virualization

Building a bunch of servers isn't even in my imaginary before but i'm running a couple now and looking forward to expand them, thanks to virtualization technology.

p.s. Billy used to say  that I write documents in such way that reads more like news reports or so... To re-read the above line I now believe.

So currently I have Ubuntu 6.10 as my base server, running VMware Server 1.5 on that. I have Samba, OpenSSHd, OpenVPNd, Apache (w/ mod_proxy) running on the bare server.  But I have a Gallery2 application running in VM (I'll say I hate to death installing and configuring PHP / MySQL related stuff and this appliance saved me really), I have WordPress appliance testing, and I even have 1 XP vm running on there, dedicated to Thunder download manager.  I have managed to use Samba for all VMs and my laptop for shared ("Virtualized Storage w/ Centralized Management", to enable Buzz-word feature of my tech' blog, for IT's sake!)

Next plan is to somehow move Samba / OpenVPN out into VMs somehow, but havn't figure out the solution so far.  Isn't seeing any free NAS Virtual Appliances around (FreeNAS definitely isn't a nice choice, OpenFiler VA, somehow, failed to get setup in my hands). 

VM's cool.

Recalled the solution from Egenera - a blade manufacture.  They made blades no more than CPU, mainboard and memory w/ I/O interfaces.  Storage are to be managed seperately as SAN.  Therefore, every blade is "stateless" - something horrible as in good old S.F.s - and are to be central managed.  Operating Systems are then created as VMs - using their own tech / formats - and hot-deploy to any available blade.  VMs will have their fake I/O, fake CPU, fake memory - all fake (ok, virtualized).  They call these empty skeleton warriors "PAN" - Process Area Network - as in "SAN".  Cool thing~~

Only thing is, VM isn't expanding its capability over the max provided by a single PAN blade (rather than N of them). It's still following the same model as IBM VM/360 from 30 years ago.  Wait to see something like OpenMosix (dead!!) or OpenSSI based virtualization solutions to come.