Why Not Build a Real Farm?
The biggest reason to build a virtual farm rather than a real farm is cost. At my company, we can host and administrate a single machine for approximately $2400 per year. The cheapest new machine that meets our hosting requirements costs at least $3000. Thus, to build a farm of six machines costs $18,000 up-front and $14,400 per year. Each new machine will cost another $3000 plus $2400 per year.
Contrast this with the virtual farm. The machine running the Krang farm costs $4275; it's a ProLiant DL360 G3 from Hewlett-Packard with dual 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 1.5 GB of RAM. The VMWare GSX Server software costs $2500. It costs $2400 per year to host and administrate, just like any other machine on our network. Thus, the total cost to set up the virtual farm is $6775 and $2400 per year. That's already much lower than setting up six machines in a real farm. But even better, adding a new machine to the virtual farm is free. It doesn't require any new hardware or administration overhead.
Another reason to build a virtual farm is the added flexibility. Adding new machines to a real farm takes time; a new machine must be ordered and set up on the network. Adding a new machine to the virtual farm can be done in just a few hours, depending only on how long the operating-system installation takes to run.
However, a real farm has advantages over a virtual farm. First, it's likely to be faster. Because all the machines in the farm can run independently, it will scale better as machines are added. Since run-time performance isn't very important for a build and test farm, this wasn't an issue for the Krang Farm project. Second, a single machine means a single point of failure. It's much more important to have a working backup system when all your eggs are in one basket!
—S.T.
