Until now I have always run my computers at home in a totally physical set up. By that I mean that disks are just that… hard disks inside the computer. The computer has generally been running either Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2.
Now I want to change things and go virtual!
The impetus behind this is that I want to have more flexibility in my computer set up. If I have a hardware failure I want to be able to port my system to another PC or even to the cloud and have the system up and running with a very short downtime. Virtualisation helps with that objective.
Moreover, if I virtualise my main system then if I want to make some radical changes or install some software that might screw things up then as a virtual machine (VM) under Hyper-V I can simply take a checkpoint and carry on knowing that I can easily back out the change later.
This is all in preparation for me moving my existing Virtual Private Server from a hosted solution at Heart Internet to a server in my office at home. Hopefully, if all goes to plan, I shall be able to migrate the domains on the Heart VPS to a Hyper-V VM thereby allowing me not to renew the Heart VPS subscription.
There are a lot of reasons I can think of not to make this change. Heart Internet is a well-known Internet Service Provider with excellent connectivity to the internet and great customer support if needed. However, I want more control and to reduce my financial cost running the server and I cannot get that with Heart.
So I intend to:
- Migrate my desktop Windows 8.1 PC to run virtually
- Migrate the Windows Server 2012 R2 to run virtually
- Create a new CentOS 7 VM to run a LAMP stack to host the domains currently hosted on the Heart VPS
- Switch my internet service provider to one that offers a fixed IP address as my current provider, BT Infinity, cannot provide that
It has a bunch of “getchers” just waiting for me and at this stage I am not even 100% certain I can achieve everything I need but it is worth a try.
So look out for more info once I have started the process.