Entering edit mode
6.7 years ago
mikhail.fokin
•
0
I am doing quite ordinary bioIT stuff like genome assemblies, transcriptomics, some phylogenies, scripting in R/bash mostly. With ~50/50 ratio of local/cluster work. Now I am thinking about some major hardware upgrade, having more local calculations in mind.
I am using several Linux VMs now, because some complex pipelines have incompatible system/libraries requirements, and I don't have enough IT skills to build them on the same system. Also it seems that it is easier to backup them as a separate VMs ...
Do you think it is a good idea to try switching to a single(main) Linux system? And pros/cons?
Hard to say really. If what you have is working for you I don't see an issue continuing as you are. Depending on the tools, it is possible to have conflicting things all on the same system (if it was a python tool for example, you can set it up inside virtual environments. It sounds like your best investment would be time into getting to grips with the finer elements of unix sys admin, so that you have a more seamless single machine experience. You may find the occaisional insurmountable conflict, but overall most software can be forced to play nicely one way or another. We have multiple versions of many peices of software on our servers for instance, to keep backward compatibility etc.
To add to this, it depends on the usage pattern. If you're running multiple VMs concurrently on the same hardware then they're competing for resources so this should be taken into account. Another possible option between one system and multiple VMs could be containers.