Im after peoples views on the following. This is very theoretical and i certainly wouldnt recommend it!

The question is simple could you have a windows server and run linux/cpanel from a virtual machine?

I personally cant see why not apart from the obvious problems including:

cost
windows
resources

However would the ability to be able to use windows to do a complete backup of the virtual machine outweight these disadvantages? The scenario being that if cpanel/linux completely fails all you have to do is start the backup virtual machine and it would be identical to how it was before the problems no reloading linux/cpanel and restoring accounts. You are in effect storing an image of the server as a backup.

Also a basic windows re-load is faster than a linux/cpanel reload. So if something goes wrong with windows you do a quick reload then just restart the virtual machine, the webserver being unaffected.

Id love to hear peoples opinions on the pros and cons of this.

I guess this ultimately leads onto the questions of: when cpanel is released for windows would you consider using this combination over linux/cpanel because of the graphical backend?

Theoritically your concept is good, but Windows is becoming bad as even developers now started to hate windows.

If your biggest worry is about backup and crash, Linux is far more stable, it runs days and days without crash, also cPanel gives very comprhiensive backup restore facility.

Even if cpanel comes for windows, it will be worst as it is written in perl and updates, security are biggest issues in windows.


You can read following post about details of Control Panels.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=4938014&postcount=9

... Windows is becoming bad as even developers now started to hate windows.

I'd like to see your statistical proof on that one.

I run quite a few FreeBSD and Linux based Virtual servers from Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise. They run flawlessy, backup easily and can be switched out in seconds should one happen to die, which has never happened.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

For fun you can see these ads, after 10 years me and our entire software dev company decided to leave microsoft. Sure apple and ubuntu are good choices, perhaps i think we are just unlucky as FC 8 and ubuntu etc and majority of linux distributions never get even installed on Virtual servers, we had to rely on vmware for that.

Anyway I will not like to elongate the arguement here, its big world and everybody have their own experiences. Probably we should wait for Visual Studio 2008 failure over failure of vista.

I won't debate Linux vs MS either, we can drop it here. I will say however that I am enjoying the helloutta Visual Studio 2008.