I can’t think of anything that change the world of System and Network Admins the past few years as much as virtualization. For example, Virtualization can enable a single person deploy a single or even multiple servers on a network in a matter of minutes instead of hours or even days. What’s even more impressive is the speed at which this technology is improving. We’re not even scratching the surface of what this technology will bring to us in a short time.
If you scour the Internet, you can find stories and case studies about huge deployments that have allowed businesses to do some pretty amazing things. The cost savings to businesses that use virtualization are easy to see and they quickly add up. You don’t need to purchase as much hardware so you don’t need to cool as much hardware. You don’t use as much electricity since you don’t have as much hardware and your A/C unit is working as hard. Virtualization should be an easy sell to any CFO.
As we at Vectorform push virtual servers into production, I’m sure I’ll write about our experiences then, but for now I’d like to talk about a small problem outside of the server room we solved with Virtualization.
We have multiple designers that constantly need to test their latest creations on a wide range of platforms. Does my site work in Windows XP? with IE 6? what about IE 7? What if the user has Windows 2000 with IE 5.5 and doesn’t have Flash installed? You get the idea. We were asked to create a test machine for the designers that had every possible operating system and browser combination possible.
Possible? Yes Practical? No. We could have installed every operating system known to man on one PC and played around with bootloaders to make it work, but that didn’t seem like a great idea. What if one XP installation goes crazy and takes the whole machine down with it? Not good. Plus, we have multiple designers that may want to test their projects at the same time.
So we decided to give virtualization a shot. We took an ordinary workstation that already had the virtualization software on it for a different project and started installing operating systems. The process is incredibly easy. Create a new virtual machine, tell it how much memory and hard drive space to allocate to the virtual machine, give it a network card, and start the machine. The virtual machine immediately “boots up” and starts installing Windows from the CD drive.
Lather.Rinse.Repeat as desired until you have all your virtual machines loaded. There isn’t really much more to explain. It really was that easy.
We now have multiple test environments that are always running that allow for multiple designers to use at once. They can remote connect to each virtual machine from their own desk. No getting up to go to the test PC. No waiting in line behind other developers. No rebooting the PC to get to a different test environment.
This little “test” of virtualization is actually going to save us a good deal of time and money. In my next post I will try to simply outline the Pro and Cons of this system, and I’ll try to get some hard numbers on potential savings from our setup.
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