A Virtual Staging Machine
Monday, 25 January, 2010 — development
This site and the others comprising our little company run on a Virtual Private Server. I’ve long thought about a staging or lab environment, but never acted on it. However, in the course of tracking down some performance issues earlier this month, it occurred to me that a VMWare image running Ubuntu would be perfect and easy to set-up. So, I’m giving it a shot.
Basically, I’ll have a much nicer way to experiment with adjustments to how I deploy Rails, have a place to learn Chef and be able to test system service configurations. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but I’m by no means the first.
There’s more to come, but it’s easy set-up. I just needed to download VMWare Fusion, the Ubuntu server ISO and my production data to get rolling. The VM is configured to run as closely as I can to how my node is running, down to available memory and disk. I just need to set-up databases, then add the VM as a Capistrano target for a few Git repositories and I can get to experimentation.Â