Since it was started almost 5 years ago, this blog run on a server in my office. The engine behind the blog is based on a set of server side applications I wrote with a for a company I'm partner with, called Geode. It is a set of XML processing applications, written in Delphi (and compiled in Kylix). Now I'm terminating the HDSL contract at my office, for a much cheaper DSL, and so I'm moving the remaining sites and services to a web farm.

Problem is in the web farm I got a new computer with a recent version of Ubuntu, and the applications and configurations will have trouble with it (including the integration with Apache). To make things easier I decided to move some of the applications and their configurations in a virtual machine, create the vm in my office copying applications, configurations, and data, and copy the vm to the server. So I set up a free vmWare server (for now, might by the more powerful version later) spent a lot of time recompiling and configuring it, and ended up with a partial solution: I'm using Apache on the main server as a proxi to the virtualized one. If you are reading this, it is working!

Although I have worked a lot over time with virtual machines on my computers, it was mostly for development reasons. This is the first I'm deploying on a vm a high-traffic site, hoping things will go on fine.

Meanwhile, I'm finishing an almost complete rewrite of the system backing the blog, with we are turning into full-blown REST servers with the ability to store and version XML documents, index them in memory, execute data processing script (written in an XML-based language), and produce web pages from the scripts directly or via an XSTL layer. I really love the technology, will write more about it once the application become stable and I migrate my blog to it (keeping it on the same server, possibly a new virtual machine).

Needless to day I long for a new Delphi language compiler for Linux and possibly a 64-bit one, but I can wait and keep my Kylix 3 up and running.