Virtualisation is for every business, but…

I use virtualisation for development purposes mainly. I have environments dedicated to Java, C++ and .NET for example. It's a really nice way of ensuring that changes on one system does not affect another as well as keeping costs down, since I don't need a full blown PC for each environment.

Also, I have some educational software for my children which requires activation and also, can only be installed a limited number of times. I've moved all of these applications to vitrual PC's and just move them around when I need to reinstall the host machine.

Works like a charm!
 
our company had 14 servers, the oldest going back to 1999 running quad p200 with nt4.0

we have virtualised them all using esxi. to be fair, the load on the actual servers was very low, very under-utilised, but my concern was hardware failures etc on the old scsi drives and controllers.

we now have 3 servers with ample spare capacity. these were from the original batch of 14, we just consolidated the ram etc etc etc to make 3 much better machines. although this brings our points of failures down to 3, and when one goes it takes out around 4 virtual machines, we have the luxury of each datastore/vm on it's own drive, so i do bare metal copies of the drives once a week when the services arent required, in additional to the usual windows backups. if a host server goes down, i just stick the drive/backup drive into another machine and go back to my moccha. this was a "no cost" solution. if we were to spend money i would get vmotion etc etc and get all fancy.

moving this all to a iscsi storage solution soon, and then i am signing off on this project. worked better than we thought, really cool stuff.
 
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I would have to disagree with the writer on how difficult a virtual environment is to manage. We have our whole data center running on vmware esx4, and to be honest yes you do need products like vCenter and Veeam Backup and Replicate, but those are minor costs. Where we had to buy 28 servers we now only buy 2 servers, both acting as "HA" for the other, with a SAN, then one backup san off site to which the Man san replicates.

The main thing to keep in mind is, Plan every part of your roll out, even plan how the infrastructure should look when you are finished to the last letter, and then make a plan to execute your plan, and so on...

Also remember if you are a company with 4 servers, the cost of going virtual is probably to high. Last thing that i want to say is that get professional help, dont think because you have loaded Hyper-v or ESX on a box and tested it you are now an expert, go for proper training if needed. If you do go vmware like we did also take the platinum support option for 24x7 support.

You need to be aware when going the virtual route, it is not as easy as you think.
 
We've just finished virtualising +-90% of our infrastructure onto Hyper-V - we have approximately 180 VMs running across 3 clusters. We have done this entirely without any external management tools, just failover cluster management, hyper-v management, batch files and powershell.

Do not skimp on:

1) Fast, reliable shared storage. Fibre channel SAN with lots of 15K drives is best.

2) Networking.

Spend your cash on these two items rather than management tools if your budget is tight. Going virtualisation without clustering is a complete waste of time, and without reliable storage and networking, you will not succeed.
 
VMware has been doing virtualisation for years now, and lately MS and Citrix have woken up and realised that it's a reality. I'm not entirely sure about the latter two companies roadmaps as they don't seem to have a real strategy - in fact they are pretty much in bed with each other right now. One has to question what MS is going to do when they have a desktop virtualisation solution (right now they partner with Citrix). I guess my point here is that you should leave virtualisation to the experts - VMware...
 
Just saw this now....

Microsoft has for a long time been a platform vendor; with Citrix as a strategic partner offering additional components. Citrix XenServer now provides native support for the VHD file format, and additional functionality when compared to HyperV.

Ironically, as mentioned above, the biggest barrier to entry for Virtualisation, is cost (the size of the environment is irrelevant). This is why HyperV and Citrix are penetrating the market as effectively as they are; because they offer (in the case of Citrix), a fully functional and supported, free product. We install XenServer for customers with just two servers, and they see all the benefits of Virtualisation, for fraction of what it would have cost before.

All IT vendors have taken a very keen interest in Virtualisation, even companies like Symantec! Interesting times, and the consumer benefits :)
 
Virtualization is a great solution for disaster recovery/BCP solutions. Using a P2V tool it is ewasy to create a VM from a live machine, on the fly. The resulting vm's can then be used for BCP testing and proof of concept.

Purchase of new hardware is delayed until a disaster actualy takes place and because a vm is hardware independant, the replacement can be up and running very quickly.
 
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