I have been testing virtualization mostly on my own desktop pc in the office. I'm not certain that virtualization would benefit my agency at this time. The applications that we use are very resource intensive and have required their own servers. This does look like a very promising technology though.

I know this is old school and paranoid thinking... but virtualization has always freaked me out because it reduces redundancy. Given the average amount of traffic/use some of our file and backup servers receive I could probably virtualize them into one (or hell, I could probably just flat out consolidate them without virtualization) without noticing much of a performance hit - but from experience I do my best to avoid single points of failures in my network.

How does virtualization deal with this, or is it just an accepted risk?

Holdstrong, the great thing about virtualization, is that if you have a good image of the virtual computer, you can get it back up and running in a matter of minutes on another machine if something goes wrong.

You are correct Gary, also with virtualization it's much easier to have a hot spare sever ready and waiting versus multiple hot spare servers in a non-virtualized environment.
This way when something does happen the hot spare server would go live and you would have nearly no downtime.

I've done virtualized servers for development. I considered doing it with a recent server migration to separate certain services, such as Web/External access on a VM.

I've been fine with the Free VM Server product.

There are also some cool open source tools available, such as XEN

Interesting indeed. This is a topic I feel woefully noobish about.

Does virtual machine imaging work cross hardware better than straight up disk imaging? If I have an image of a virtual machine and plop it down into a new server with different hardware, how does it react?

Also, although it appears recovery can be quick if I am around and have prepared for the occasion... the single point of failure appears to still exist, especially if I happen to be on vacation or otherwise unavailable.

For example, let's say we have 4 servers and I am on vacation. If one of them goes down, the office loses only the functionality of that server till I get back. If we have 1 server doing all 4 of those jobs, via virtualization (or otherwise), and it goes down while I am on vacation.... bam?

Overall the idea is intriguing. Especially the thought of cutting hardware expenditure down. I am having a bit of a hard time conceptualizing how I would run it in my set up given our server needs.

But I am looking at a request to set up a test win 2003 server with IIS for one of our web devs. I think this might be a prime opportunity to try it out.

I, too, have to admit to being a neophyte in this area. It definitely looks like something I should investigate, though. If anyone has any good references handy they would be appreciated.

Holdstrong, am I to infer from your comments that you are in my position of being the entire IT department for your organization in and of yourself?

Let me try and catch everything from your post.

Virtualization does do better cross platform. You would first load a base OS (Linux/Windows) and then load your VMs on top of this shell using the software. Inside of the virtualization software you'll load the OS again, this time doing all of the configuration necessary. If you're backing up the image state, you should be able to load that entire image on any system with a few hours of configuring the base OS and virtualization software. Often there is just a virtual server config file and a virtual disk (although you can do a physical disk too!).

In a small NPO, you make a great point. People can be a single point of failure. Make sure that your backup person or consultant understands your network and is comfortable administering VMs.

Your next example. Let's say you've got a "base" then loaded into there four VM's "DomainController" "FileServer/SecondaryDomainController" "EMailServer" and "WebServer". If the "base" freezes, everything stops. If any of the other servers stop they should not cause the others to quit working. Each server runs in its own protected area.

Now on that note, lets say you have 4 servers that would cost $3k in hardware (total $12k). Let's say you purchase a single server for $5k that can handle the load of all of them. You could spend another $5k and form a redundant cluster, still having a $2k savings.

Web is a great example to try it out on. Another great way to get a start is check out some of the VMWare Virtual Appliances. You can download some of these and play with the tools just to see how it works. Specifically I've used an Internet Proxy/Monitor (Dans Guardian) and a Virtual Learning Suite (Moodle, iFolder, Apache, MySQL, etc...)

Here is a website that is easy to read and will answer a lot of questions:

http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/


Since the test server for our intranet died, we are planning on moving our test environment to VMWare as soon as next week. If this goes well for an extended period, we will look to move our production intranet web site to the virtual world as well.

That is a great link, thanks for chiming in. Are there any advantages to VMware instead of the Microsoft virtual PC or Server?

I actually went to a VMWare seminar (Chicago, IL) last week and unfortunately it was more sales-pitched and a "I know more than you" contest between IT folk at Fortune 500 companies. Unfortunately, being from a 501c3 with only 7 production servers, the examples were all typical of large corporate enterprise environments.

The one thing I did notice is that VMWare is taking Microsoft's introduction into this market very seriously. VMWare claims they are 3-5 years ahead in terms of technology, but are very cautious in terms of bundling their products due to MS Virtual Server being included in Server 2008 (for an additional $20 I think?).

The engineer from VMWare who was speaking mentioned that Dell is now shipping out VMWare embedded into the BIOS so that there is a 100% guarantee that there are no conflicts with hardware. He said that the footprint for this is 32MB whereas Microsoft's is supposedly anywhere from 700 MB-2.2GB.

He also said that VMWare Server is very stripped down and and runs on top of the O/S vs. ESX that runs on bare metal and the O/S is installed on top. In so many words, he indicated that VMWare ESX is the preferred option in production environments (especially when converting physical machines to virtual ones).

We're in the process of investigating whether we should delve into virtualization in 2009 or stay as we are (7 servers) due to cost, etc.

VMotion (from VMWare) is a pretty impressive product as well. My only issue would be cost and how VMWare gets along with Exchange and SQL.

I have some pamphlets from VMWare, if you'd like a copy, please let me know at dean at ilipra dot org.

Hi Mike,

You betcha, like you, I am the lone fish in my pond. So single point of failure takes on a whole new meaning for us I suppose. I do my best to keep most of our technology and systems Mack Truck proof (if I get hit by a Mack Truck the place won't completely shut down) - but it can be hard sometimes to strike that balance between budget, efficiency, and Mack Trucked'ness. :tongue;

Thanks for all the info on VM. I am definitely going to explore it more (starting with a virtual copy of Vista here at home and then moving to a win2003 iis test set up at work) and at the very least keep an eye on the technology as it grows. I can certainly see its potential.

Well Gary, the advantage that I see to VMWare is that it ain't Microsoft!

All kidding aside, I am very new on this journey, and not in a position to vote for one over the other. I must emphasize that the link I provided earlier is for VMWare, and therefore is going to be biased in that direction. Take all that you read there with a grain of salt, but many of the concepts and theorys in that link hold true regardless of which vendor you choose.

I've been virtualized for years. We started back when VMWare Workstation was at version 3. I started off using it as a development environment on my desktop so I could test new features of the network OS without disturbing the production environment. Then I started using it so I could build ZenWorks application snapshots and distribute those over the network.

I was in production not a year later, with just VMWare Workstation, when our old NT4 web server was compromised into a public FTP server - lol. I brought the site back up in Windows Server 2000, locked it down, and was running it virtually off my desktop for about 5 months until we identified new hardware to put it on.

Today, we use it at my consulting company for production machines. We believe that Linux as the host OS for VMWare Server works better than Windows, but that's just an educated guess with no data to back it up - because the host OS doesn't need to take up as many system resources to operate.

We are looking at VMWare's ESX Server for our R&D efforts. ESX Server maxes out at 64GB RAM. So if Microsoft Virtual Server has to run with Windows Server 2008 as the host, then you are going to run into RAM problems down the road and may be forced to install the 64-bit or enterprise version(s) of Windows in order to get past 4 GB RAM for the host (and thus more available RAM for the guests). Take a look at this MS article for Windows Server 2008 limitations. When you want to run a lot of virtual servers, with RAM being so cheap these days you want to be able to give those virtual servers a lot of RAM each, maybe even the max 4GB each. Something to think about... maybe even run Linux instead as the host to get up to 64GB RAM available to guests.

If any of you are looking for a good, not-so-sales-pitchy VMWare event, try to find a VMUG (VMWare User Group) event in your area. There's a group here in Connecticut. Yes, the examples were definitely enterprise-level and that was disappointing to me, but the engineers they send are very open to discuss your smaller needs.

Microsoft's Virtual PC - well, they didn't design it. They bought it. And you can't run Linux as the host OS, so you're stuck with a Windows server being the host, which I don't necessarily like. Here's a heavily Linux-biased article on MS Virtual PC 2007.

I could talk for hours and hours on Virtualization.