Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation

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

  1. Buy small moderatley powered entry level server
  2. Buy smallish UPS system and Backup System
  3. 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
  4. Do minimal customized configuration to templates
  5. Setup automatic backups of all virtual machines
  6. 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.
 
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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
 
retromodcoza said:
  1. Buy small moderatley powered entry level server
  2. Buy smallish UPS system and Backup System
  3. 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
  4. Do minimal customized configuration to templates
  5. Setup automatic backups of all virtual machines
  6. 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.
Click to expand...

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.

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.
 
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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...
 
hammell said:
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...
Click to expand...

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
 
w1z4rd said:
Virtulization is a sales gimmick.
Click to expand...

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...
 
PsyWulf said:
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
Click to expand...

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...
 
hammell said:
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...
Click to expand...

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.
 
w1z4rd said:
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.
Click to expand...

Unlikely,I can restore a server VM in an hour,0 Config required,click and go
 
PsyWulf said:
Unlikely,I can restore a server VM in an hour,0 Config required,click and go
Click to expand...

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.
 
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PsyWulf said:
In a SME with 2-3 servers you are going to repoint where exactly? :)
Click to expand...

Aaah small stuff. Well I suppose if you dont have proper redundancy or a well thought out backup solution I can see how it could help. Kinda(ish). Still not the solution I would implement, but hey, it works for some people in certain circumstances it seems.

Luckily on my SME`s I work with I only use linux and mostly the same hardware, so a recovery for those is around the time it takes to swop a hard drive into a new mini server.
 
w1z4rd said:
Aaah small stuff. Well I suppose if you dont have proper redundancy or a well thought out backup solution I can see how it could help. Kinda(ish). Still not the solution I would implement, but hey, it works for some people in certain circumstances it seems.
Click to expand...

Well as the article was aimed at SME Virtualization and backup as opposed to a clustered-livesync is fiscally less intensive.

In which area virtualization is also a major boon with 0 hardware dependance - differently specced systems from different vendors could be used to host these systems with no driver/config incompatabilities. These setups can also migrate servers dependant on loads/failures to promote this 0 downtime requirement quite seamlessly ( no dns update required ;) )
 
PsyWulf said:
Well as the article was aimed at SME Virtualization and backup as opposed to a clustered-livesync is fiscally less intensive.

In which area virtualization is also a major boon with 0 hardware dependance - differently specced systems from different vendors could be used to host these systems with no driver/config incompatabilities. These setups can also migrate servers dependant on loads/failures to promote this 0 downtime requirement quite seamlessly ( no dns update required ;) )
Click to expand...

Yeah just hardware resources.

Lets hope that hardware you are over working does not crash, cause now its not one server you have to recover, but several! All down at the same time ;)
 
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w1z4rd said:
Yeah just hardware resources ;)
Click to expand...

Hmm just a bit confused,requiring a dns update with 0 virtualization would mean a tertiary (mirrored) server being available anyway as no backup restoration is instant? In which case you invested in the same amount of hardware,but just complicating the setup :)

Have you ever tried Virtualization and gotten burnt or are you just stubbornly certain that a technology being supported by even desktop PCs will die a silent death :P
 
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