Bearing in mind the high investment cost of all this proposed server hardware, plus electricity to run all of these server systems, I decided that I would pay my old friend VMWare a visit.  VMWare is software that allows you to partition a single computers hardware into many "logical" computers, each able to run their own operating system and software independent of any other "logical" computers running under the same hardware umbrella.  Now I have used VMWare to emulate desktops of various operating systems as a test bed for my software development since the 90's, but I never "hunkered down" with it and used it in more than a passive manner.  Knowing that VMWare, in a battle for marketshare with Microsoft's competing Hyper-V technology (more on that soon), has made their VMWare Server 2.0 software available for free, I decided that I would design my infrastructure to be a "virtual infrastructure", and set about my way to make this happen.

So now I have my virtual infrastructure designed in my head, I need to consider the workstation where all of the programming and graphic design will take place.  I want to have "sandboxes" in which to test DesertMoonCircle.com in without causing downtime to the actual website, and without having to change a bunch of different configuration settings when going from test servers to production servers - this requires me to mimic the actual production environment as closely as possible.  Again, virtualization is the key player here, and these tasks in particular are of the variety that virtualization handles the best.  Only this time, on the workstation side of the road, I will use Microsoft's Hyper-V (which I touched upon earlier) for a variety of reasons (more on that in another blog post).

After all of this planning, I realized that I had forgotten something.  As many of you know, Caria and I have a pretty kick ass Media Center setup in our home, allowing us instant on-demand access to our extensive collection of movies, music and photos from nearly anywhere in our home, including my office, which has seating and an HDTV in order to serve double duty as my recluse of solitude.  I forgot to figure in the fact that my server operating systems do not include the Media Center application.  So I had to re-arrange my infrastructure design to accommodate for an operating system with Media Center access within my office.  Whoops.  But you know what, it turned out rather interesting, as I'll explain in the next part of this seemingly endless blog post...