NAMPP the Speedy Virtual Server

[mowestusa]

I was wondering if Linc or others that have tried a NAMPP solution could go into more detail over the value of it.

Linc mentioned on the last episode that he was trying out a NAMPP solution in VMware Workstation and was impressed by its speed. For those who know more about this than I:

1. What about the NAMPP was faster? Did you notice boot up was faster? Did you notice that PHP programs were faster?

2. It was mentioned the extreme small size of the image. Would that affect the speed?

3. What versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL were installed?

4. How does a NAMPP virtual server compare to a specially designed LAMPP virtual server? (Can you get the same speed and small form factor?)

Now to really show my lack of understanding when it comes to virtual machines.

5. It was mentioned that you could put a bunch of these virtually servers on a CD to show off or test all sorts of things. Do you need VMware Workstation to make such a CD or are these just one file with your PHP programs that you can dump onto a CD and run on another machine that VMware Workstation installed?

I would love to get into this whole virtual world, but I really don't know where to start since there are so many options out there. I would love to find a virtual server product that would let me install Windows 2000 (a legal copy) and then run the one program I can't get anything like under Linux, then have the ability to cut and paste text out of the one program into a Linux program running natively under Linux, but I don't know what even lets you do that. I don't know if there is a free way of doing it, or if I have to bit the bullet and buy VMware Workstation or the pay versions of Virtual Box or Parallels.

Thanks for mentioning the virtual stuff on the last show. It was an interesting discussion.

[Linc]

1. What about the NAMPP was faster? Did you notice boot up was faster? Did you notice that PHP programs were faster?

Bootup is pretty fast by default because it's NetBSD and traditionally, NetBSD is pretty sparse with services that turn on at startup.

2. It was mentioned the extreme small size of the image. Would that affect the speed?

In a round about way, yes. The less things you are actually running, the faster things run. This also can hold true with the kernel. NetBSD is smaller than most Linuxen all the way around.

3. What versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL were installed?

Looks to be current versions of all.

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4. How does a NAMPP virtual server compare to a specially designed LAMPP virtual server? (Can you get the same speed and small form factor?)

Well, I imagine as fast or slightly faster. A lot of the depends on the amount of work you want to get into tightening things down. NetBSD is pretty thin to begin with.

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5. It was mentioned that you could put a bunch of these virtually servers on a CD to show off or test all sorts of things. Do you need VMware Workstation to make such a CD or are these just one file with your PHP programs that you can dump onto a CD and run on another machine that VMware Workstation installed?

Depends upon how you want to do things. If you are just running some php, the all you need is the php, however, if you are developing a web application with data stored in sql or what have you, than having a virtual machine running lamp would be a great way to have a portable web application I would think.

[allix]

I don't know if there is a free way of doing it, or if I have to bit the bullet and buy VMware Workstation or the pay versions of Virtual Box or Parallels.

A free and open solution is qemu with the kqemu module that is now under the gpl, before it was just qemu , but Fabrice Bellard has kindly opened kqemu up.

Depending on your hardware or what you want to run as the guest os, you can run various paravirtualization solutions such as xen, ,openvz, kvm and i believe qemu can do that too, but it means you modify the guest os. If you have a recent intel or amd ,
Intel VT and AMD-V extensions respectively you can use the just mentioned apps without modyfiying the guest.