Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation
Businesses embracing the Internet were often able to ‘leapfrog’ their competition by doing things faster, smarter, bigger and relatively cheaper.
Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation
Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation
Businesses embracing the Internet were often able to ‘leapfrog’ their competition by doing things faster, smarter, bigger and relatively cheaper.
I wish someone would produce a practical implementation/example of virtualisation and where it would benefit a small business user.
IBM z/os mainframe systems has been doing this for years. Nothing new.
Example
- Buy small moderatley powered entry level server
- Buy smallish UPS system and Backup System
- Download and install server preconfigured server templates , such as an asterix system , lampp server for website, CRM system , accounting system , doc management system, ticket system , mail server etc
- Do minimal customized configuration to templates
- Setup automatic backups of all virtual machines
- All done in a mornings work
And , recovery in event of a problem is a snap and can be done remotely.
Drastically lowers cost of implementation for a small business.
Last edited by retromodcoza; 12-12-2010 at 01:25 PM.
Collapsed 12 physical servers into 3 using one of the SME Kits and still in the process of converting the rest. Initial costs were high and convincing the bosses to dish out cash for servers, storage, licensing was tough but savings on Power (UPS, Power Bills ,Generator), 100% uptime, snapshots, disaster recovery abilities... was well worth it.
Vendors are also providing virtual editions of their appliances, which eliminate downtime when hardware fails and you have to wait for device to be RMA'd
Yup, we use one 'moderately powered' server with several VMs as a build server, a separate SSH server, for running software tests on multiple platforms, and we're setting up more VMs with more uses, e.g. proxy, intranet web server etc. It's almost like a network of machines, in a box. With RDP and VNC etc. you can also easily set up access over the network to each machine, and with bridged network it's almost like having an actual network of machines in one box, especially if the one machine is decently fast.Originally Posted by retromodcoza
It also helps security as you can split e.g. a file server and an intranet web server (for example, replace with whatever you like), and if one gets hacked it's only that one.
VMWare sucks though. Used to be good, but was clearly getting progressively more awful, we had so many problems with it, now we use VirtualBox, which is also free.
Some interesting trends in more advanced virtualization also include things like automatic load balancing on clusters (e.g. if you have 10 servers and 100 VMs, the system can monitor things like memory and CPU usage and automatically move or start VMs to/on different machines to balance the load) as well as underlying hardware failure detection and transparent automatic failover / transfer to other machines, meaning in theory - if done right - we can now actually have e.g. a web server with 100% uptime, in theory. Kind of like the Cylons.
Also a bonus, you just keep backups of the VM, if the main machine fails or you need to reinstall the OS or whatever, you just copy it over and fire it up on another machine and it's back.
Last edited by Tick; 12-12-2010 at 05:56 PM.
Or Hyper-v which is free. VMware for the SMB is too expensive. While it's probably still the best hypervisor, there is no reason for SMBs to pay too much for virtualisation...
Cylons. We're getting there
Virtulization is a sales gimmick.
“I believe Ayn Rand's first love poem went: Roses are red, violets are blue, finish this poem yourself you dependent parasite".”
Colbert
Citrix Xenserver is one of your best bets between free and good,the Hypervisor Server 2008 is a bit much of an overhead and the bare-bones takes more learning to be useable
That's a ridiculous statement. If you think it's a gimmick you simply don't understand the use of it. More servers on less hardware, higher availability, quicker recovery times, quicker deployment times, no planned downtime for hardware, etc, etc...
Saying that, ESXi is free, and for non paravirtualised environments it beats Xen... Anyway Xen is a little too fragmented in my opinion, except perhaps for desktop virtualisation where it beats VMware...
I know that virtulization uses resources that dont need to be used. I use jails and have proper backup solutions. I dont need virtulization. It slows my hardware down. I dont have downtime on my servers, if I am not clouding I have full rsync backups that could get that service up in as long as it takes too switch DNS.
“I believe Ayn Rand's first love poem went: Roses are red, violets are blue, finish this poem yourself you dependent parasite".”
Colbert
Unlikely,I can restore a server VM in an hour,0 Config required,click and go
And I can repoint my dns in 1 min. My solution > Yours
I think the big difference here is I cant afford to have my services offline for 10 min, let alone 1 hour.
Last edited by ghoti; 13-12-2010 at 10:14 AM.
“I believe Ayn Rand's first love poem went: Roses are red, violets are blue, finish this poem yourself you dependent parasite".”
Colbert
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