Talk:Virtual file server

Focus of this article

A virtual file server can mean several totally different things:

A traditional file server deployed on a virtualized platform.
A single virtual server as far as the users see that is implemented using multiple physical or virtual servers for redundancy or load balancing.
A virtual file service provided through cloud computing.
Accessing any type of file server across a VPN.
A SAN.
A NAS.

The current article tries to be all things and gets tied around its ankles in the process. We have separate articles on all these topics. What are we trying to accomplish here? I can't find a current industry standard definition of the exact term "virtual file server". This article started life as an ad for a specific product with this name. I'm not sure that it is salvageable. UncleDouggie (talk) 23:59, 29 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, well ... Maybe it should be turned into a sort of disambiguation page? The term is used quite often, probably with one of those meanings or any of several others. The list above indicates the entries in the disambig list. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps. It wouldn't really be a dab page since the various uses aren't actually named a virtual file server. It would be more of a short article listing the possible interpretations of the phrase. This article has no incoming wikilinks from prose in any other article. It does get 200 page views per month. I don't know how many of those are web crawlers or random article requests. I can't find many articles that get under 150 views per month. UncleDouggie (talk) 06:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I checked an article on a very obscure subject and found it gets 70 hits a month, so 200 per month for this one probably means there is some interest. There are many sort-of-related articles, not very consistent. Some talk about abstract concepts, some about very specific implementations. See virtual appliance, virtual file system, virtual machine, virtual private server, platform virtualization and many others. Maybe this should just redirect to one of those, but which? Aymatth2 (talk) 12:31, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Virtual private server is probably the best, although that article needs lots of work as well. UncleDouggie (talk) 19:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The way Virtual private server is written now doesn't work for me, because it describes it as a partition of one physical server. To me, a virtual server is something that looks like a physical server to the client, and could be, or could be a partition of a physical server, but could also be a collection of physical servers, or even a collection of partitions. And it could morph from one of those configurations to another without the client being aware of the change. I think this whole set of articles needs review as a whole. I am not qualified to do it. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:32, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]