I am currently hosting a few small ColdFusion driven websites and a SQL 2000 database on a Windows 2000 server. I'm looking for advice but I think I want to move towards a virtualized setup. I have been spending increasingly more time fighting security issues on the win2k box and it takes forever to get things running again.
My development machine is a MacBook Pro and I use VMWare Fusion with a virtualized XP machine to run SQL Enterprise Manager. It works great and I love the snapshot feature. That's really what makes me think I want to virtualize my hosting setup. That way I can simply backup the databases, revert to the snapshot, restore the databases and I'm in business again.
I also considered outsourcing the hosting altogether but I don't make enough money on hosting to cover the cost. Besides that I'm stuck using SQL Server 2000 (and therefore some Windows OS) for various reasons and all of the top hosting companies are running SQL Server 2005 at a minimum. Add ColdFusion to the mix and that further reduces the possibilities and increases the challenge.
I have also tried migrating the databases to Apache/MySQL but it just doesn't work. I've tried several SQL Server to MySQL migration tools numerous times and I get nothing but errors every time. Support docs, forums, etc offered no help so I gave up after fighting with it for a solid week. VERY frustrating to say the least. I also have one site that is dependent on full text indexing and I'm not even sure that functionality exists with MySQL.
Now that I have explained WHY I want to do this, is there any reason to think this won't work before I invest any more time or resources with it?
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