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Plenty Of Traveling, VMWare
By Derek | August 17, 2007
I traveled to the Tyler area this week, and worked for a couple of customers out there. One of the primary things we worked on was implementing virtual servers on VMWare Server.
If you don’t know what VMWare is all about, and you are in the IT industry, I urge you to do a serious evaluation of it, or of a competing product.
Here’s a rundown of the (as I see them) key points…
- Host pre-installed “appliances” for single-task servers.
- Convert existing out-of-date or failing physical servers into virtual servers on a brand-new host.
- Export periodic “images” of your running servers for off-site backups and disaster recovery solutions.
- Consolidate servers, and free up server room rack space, and save on electricity and cooling costs.
- Separate different “third-party” software solutions onto their own virtual server, so that said vendor has a more difficult time “pointing fingers” when something goes wrong.
- Install a server OS once, customize it, and then deploy that image again and again for new “servers.”
- Evaluate new or different solutions, such as Linux, in a risk-free environment.
- I’m sure there are other benefits, but that’s about all I can think of right now. 🙂
One of this week’s customers hadn’t really heard of virtualization, and now she is running five (5) virtual servers! One was converted from a physical machine, and was her school districts’ existing web server. On that particular machine, their SCSI backplane was failing, and they were down to a single drive, with no redundancy. Now that server’s image runs on a brand-spanking new Dell, with eight (8) “cores” and eight (8) gigabytes of RAM.
The other customer had done some virtualization, and needed far less help using the software, but had some other nagging network problems regarding DNS. We think we’ve got those solved. One of his domain controllers had been off line for a time, and he didn’t realize that it hosted backup DNS, as well as the schema FSMO role. He took it off line originally, because it hadn’t been replicating in some time.
I also stopped off at Mike’s in Austin on the way home. We spent a few hours just chatting about, um, VMWare and stuff. He’s playing with running a certain popular BSD-based OS on his VMWare Workstation. He was showing me that he was able to get it up and running, although it wasn’t optimized to run in a VM, and certainly not on an AMD machine! 🙂
I got back home to a ton of postal mail… I guess that’s what happens when you travel near the end of the month!
Topics: Linux, Me, Microsoft, Technology, Work | 1 Comment »
One Response to “Plenty Of Traveling, VMWare”
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August 20th, 2007 at 6:58
Hey! It was great having you there (at the school) I needed someone to show those videos who wouldn’t freak out… Now I’m not about to burst… Hey, I’ll message you back later, but we are going on our cruise today, so it will be at least a week. Talk to you later! ~Lani