Virtually Amazing

A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization. This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many. Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example. You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your data files, database, web site and terminal server. Maybe you have a program that doesn’t play nice with others. Before virtualization, you would need to purchase a separate server for each of these tasks to have an ideal environment. I’ve seen plenty of servers overloaded with tons of applications by clients trying to stretch their server dollar. Heck, I built some of them. Servers can get expensive, especially when you need several.

Server virtualization has changed my world. Specifically a company called VMware. When they introduced their products, they had ‘virtually’ no competition. Now other companies, like Citrix and Microsoft have released their versions of server virtualization software, and are slowly stealing market share. I think that VMware’s products are the most feature rich, and the most stable. The best part about these providers is that they all have a free version. Server consolidation is the future, do more with less. There are many benefits, less power consumption, less hardware to purchase and maintain. High availability, and restoring to dissimilar hardware to name a few.

Don’t get me wrong, I love upgrading, especially servers. But they used to be such a pain. It would consist of me going on-site after hours or on a weekend and being there until the job was done. I’d be reloading programs, migrating users, setting up shares and printers, reconfiguring workstations. There were times I’d get on-site at 5pm after working a full day and wouldn’t leave until sometime the next day. There were always unknowns that would crop up delaying the process. It was all very rewarding in the end, but it was hard getting there.

I did a server upgrade a few weeks ago that just made me sit back and say “wow.” It’s what made me want to write about VMware. It was so unlike the server upgrades of the past, I just can’t get over how cool it was. From the comfort of my couch, I was able to convert 2 slow, old physical servers onto one new VMware server. I started the conversion, watched some TV, checked back on it in a few hours and it was done. I shut down the old servers and the upgrade was complete. The next day we went on-site during the day and removed the old servers. We probably spent a total of 1 hour on-site just delivering the new server and taking away the old ones. No loading operating systems and migrating settings, no copying data, just a conversion process from physical to virtual. The virtual versions of these servers boot faster, operate quicker and instantly utilize the new physical hardware that runs them. We’ve since added a third virtual server to the same box, eliminating all the servers in their server room but the new one. And backing them up is a breeze to with VMware’s snapshot technology.