No more hiding in the server room

Virtualization – okay, what’s the catch?

Rob Atkinson’s great webinar on Hyper-V really got me thinking more concretely about virtualization. I’m hoping that some of you, especially anyone who’s been doing this virtualization stuff for a while, can tell me more about what it’s like after you’ve gotten going.

The questions I've got are:

How do you keep your VMs organized? Do they have any tendency to proliferate and get out of control?
Do you ever have problems propagating changes across the various virtual machines you’ve got?
If you’ve got a change control process, have the VMs become part of it?
If an application is performing like a dog, what do you do about it?

… Or are there other considerations I haven’t even thought of?

The Beautiful Dream seems to be that you migrate P2V and never think about it again... but that just sounds too good to be true!

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Thomas Stensitzki on March 27, 2009 at 3:42pm

Using virtualization reduces the risk of unresponding systems after applying software updates (OS or application). This is a great help for a sys admin. It is much easier to scale the hardware properties of a VM than it is for a real server.
But(!) if you do not keep an eye on a VM environment, it tends to get out of control. Especially when you provide a developement environment with self service and VM creation for developers.
We use two separate environments: one for production systems, one for developers.
The production systems are monitored and taken care of with strict support plans being applied. The dev systems are talen of with reduced support. But the fundamental services (AD, DNS, SQL) for the devs are running with special permissions.
Currently we use a plain VMware ESX environment, but I'll add a first Hyper-V system in a few weeks and I will give VMM 2008 a chance :-)

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Ayer on March 30, 2009 at 12:50pm

Thanks for the reply, Thomas. It still sounds pretty rosy!

In your company, how much do your developers have to know about being sys admins? Or do you handle all that stuff (eg AD configuration) yourself? Is there any risk that they could accidentally mess with your production setup?

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Stensitzki on March 30, 2009 at 1:58pm

Elizabeth,
our developers cannot mess up our production setup. The development and the production setup are separated setups. The development setup runs in a subdomain where developers have elevated rights. The can create required service accounts by themselves. VMs can be provisioned by themselves in the development setup. In production selected developers can stop/restart some VMs, just in case of an emergency.