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Virtual Machine Experiences
I recently had a discussion with my older brother who manages the servers for a large city on the West Coast. I was sharing how virtual servers, providing the same capacity as a physical server, actually cost more to own and maintain. My brother replied that Virtual servers had actually saved the city a great deal of expense. After picking up my jaw off the ground he continued to explain.
The first issue they faced was due to power consumption. So many different organizations within the city had requirements to have isolated systems resulting in server sprawl. They had a policy that only one of their two Giant power supplies, left over from mainframe days, had to be able to supply power for their servers. They were at capacity.
A second issue they were experiencing was space. The racks were full, but more need for servers was constant.
Heat was another issue they had to overcome. With a power outage, heat in the server room was an additional issue due to the loss of air conditioning.
Many of the servers in place were grossly under-utilized. However, because the server resources were isolated, the extra capacity was lost to the city.
The biggest problem was the ability to failover the multitude of machines. Clustering and other failover capabilities were often not possible because they were at capacity keeping the primary system online.
This is a perfect scenario for virtualization. Even with reduced performance of a virtual machine, many of the departmental systems moved into virtual environments had equivalent responsiveness. The capacity of a server was more fully utilized as processes could be balanced across a set of servers. Failover was more easily managed as well.
Using Virtualization he was able to place systems requiring a different operating system on a single machine. This also reduced the number of servers required to support the enterprise.
Clearly this is a scenario for a large organization experiencing server sprawl. Some of our readers respond with their experiences regarding virtualization on a smaller scale, or using virtual machines to enable development and test scenarios.
Mark:
First of all, thanks for another great discussion. I for one have a lot to gain from your readers comments. Having worked in many infrastructures both great and small, I understand many of the possibilities, but am having to set up my own infrastructure right now for one of our small/medium sized business endeavours. I am eager to gain some insights from the voices of experience.
May I point out that, whilst production virtual architectures require other considerations, as a developer, it is almost impossible to imagine working on development projects without a host of virtual machines/architectures catering for the varied needs of development projects. Whether it’s the classic trifector of Development/Unitary Testing/Acceptance Testing virtual environments, or providing basic stand alone architectures (AD, Email services, database serivices, etc.), it is not only cost effective, but quite simply necessary if one is to offer any degree of manageable application development at any level, small or otherwise. Even if one is talking about a one man development operation, development license fees are virtually negligible and the ability to “hot swap” entire architectures at whim on existing hardware, just by unloading/loading pre-configured virtual machines, is just too advantages to not consider.
Obviously I am talking about one application of virtual technologies, but for any developer out there, virtual environments were made for us. I know that I may make some systems admins amongst the readers cringe, but since performance issues, manageability and scalability are of a lesser concern for developers, we can really go to town on making our bottom line business far more productive all at a more than acceptable cost, even if the operation is small…and that is of benefit to both us and our clients.
Alec:
2 years ago I tried to virtualize medium size SharePoint farm and did not have good experience with SQL server on VMware.
No problems running development and UAT on VM though, but I am still leery about running IO intensive software either on VMware or on Hyper-V.
There are number of articles how to tune-up VMware for SQL server, but I did not have time to experiment with that yet.
Would be nice to get production “success stories” so that I can either stir customers away from SQL virtualization or bring them on.
Pam:
We’ve been actively working on migrating all of our servers over to virtual this past year. At this point, all but two clustered servers have been virtualized (and we’re working on those). With all regions counted, we have around 25-30 dedicated SQL Server machines (and roughly another 100 virtualized Windows servers). IT is in the final planning/proof of concept stages to make our desktops virtualized as well.
Disaster recovery and ease of deployment/maintenance are the biggest drivers for us. The biggest drawback I’ve found is that while that extra layer makes many things much simpler and easier, it also at times means less visibility into the core processes and can hinder performance troubleshooting.
Do you have virtualization experience you are free to share with us? It would sure be helpful to hear issues you had to resolve, issues you were unable to resolve, benefits you gained, or scenarios where virtualization was the best fit for you business objectives.
Not everyone works for a large city. Many of us work for small to mid-size businesses with different needs. Are you finding ways for Virtual Servers to meet your needs?
Have you moved from virtualization to the Cloud? Perhaps you can share with us the factors that sent you down that path, and how it has changed your processes and expectations.
Send your comments to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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