Best Practical practice for Server/Dev Environments

[Robert_F_2]

At long last I am making my CentOS boot stick and copying BIOS versions to another stick.   Hopefully the magic smoke will not escape...

1 Primary Physical Box -3-4 mics -  2-3 small Projects, 4-6 remote users not terribly concurrent.

Some R, some Pynum, some C++ a bit of this a dash of that...

XEN -> and then carve up a stack of administrative servers and development vms?

Centos -> VMWare>

Something else...

What's best practice for establishing a stable multiuser workstation environment and versatile development environments that doesn't trash the base libraries on  a regular basis and also doesn't require significant adminstrative overhead that will allow projects to take turns or split the mic resources?

Is there a commonly used configuration where I can specifically attach/detach mics to an environment?

Not looking for significant snapshotting just the ability to keep people/and myself from making a mess that takes a rebuild to recover from.

Thanks,

Robert

[JJK]

you're asking many questions at once ... I'll try to answer some of them:

• virtualising your hardware will incur a 10-20% performance penalty, both on the host side as well as on the offloading side (transferring data to/from the Phis)
• thrashing base libraries can only be done by the root user (normally) . Other users should not have write access. If you want to give multiple users root access then you should consider virtualisation.
• if you must use virtualisation then consider upgrading to CentOS 7 (at least) - newer kernels do a better job at virtualisation.
• as for assigning a particular Phi to a particular user: there is not "standard" to do this, but you could achieve this by modifying the ssh authorized_keys files on each Phi.
• I'd recommend to reboot a Phi after a particular user is done, to ensure that the Phi returns to a "known good " state