I am in the beginning stages of implementation of DNN, and I would like to gauge the opinion of the community on the performance merits of using physical hardware versus virtual machines.

Thanks.

Derek

Two Scenarios:

1.  Large Implementation - used as an Internet portal, 150,000 Page Views / Day, Variety of Content Wide Spectrum but Single Portal Installation, # of Pages will grow, but will start in the neighborhood of 500 - 1000 pages, Content Will Be Read Only, Possibly with Forumns.  Virtualizing 2 Web Servers Load Balanced with a physical database server. No User Registration, Only Content Owners will register.

2.  Small Implementation - used as a corporate intranet site, 10,000 Page Views / Day, Limited Content Area with the possibility for growth also a Single Portal Installation, the number of pages will also grow but will start out at roughly 500, some content will be read-only other content will change daily. Virtualizing 1 Web Server with the Database Server Colocated on the same machine.

Do you see a problem with either of these possible portal configurations as Virtual Machines?  Or do you feel that one or both of these scenarios should be completely physical servers?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Derek

I'll agree with the other statement -- your question is too vague.

However, I have a fairly detailed thread I posted here: Deployment Nightmare from Hell, some time ago.  On the second page it shows the sort of resources we have behind our VM setup.

I must say that I really like the VM setup because we can very quickly and easily add another node if necessary, backups/restores are easy (so disaster recovery gets big bonus here).  We use DNN for our corporate intranet and, to date, I have written ~20 modules for it to run all sorts of internal functions such as a massive user directory with company hierarchy, etc; an in-depth calendaring system complete with signups and workflow, and more.

If you have the resources to do it, go VM.  On that note, VMWare has a FREE VMServer if you want to start out light and build up to ESX.  It kicks the Microsoft's ones pants off.

Good luck!