Should I consolidate multiple identical VMs into BSD jails?

Posted by Josh on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Josh
Published on 2012-09-28T15:18:45Z Indexed on 2012/09/28 15:39 UTC
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Filed under:

vmware-esxi

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memory

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freebsd

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openfire

We run a number of Openfire XMPP/Jabber servers. Due to the way Openfire works, we cannot easily run multiple Openfire instances on one server, so I have 5 identical VMware ESXi VMs, each with CentOS, MySQl, Java, and Openfire. They're the exact same, except for their IP addresses, the actual Openfire MySQL database and it's config file.

I am wondering if this is the optimal configuration, or if it would be better to move these VMs to a single FreeBSD machine and put each one inside a FreeBSD jail. Specifically, I am wondering if the benefit of VMWare's Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) would outweight the cost of running 5 identical OSes. Would I end up using less memory with one large FreeBSD machine and java running in bsd jails?

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